


Smashed Birds

by cannibalinc



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Ableism, Age Difference, All the suburban dads, Alternate Universe - Werewolves Are Known, Coercion, Daddy Kink, Depression, Dissociation, Dubious Consent, Emissary in Training Stiles Stilinski, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Exploitation, Hallucinations, M/M, Magical Realism, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Malia is Trans, Masturbation, No Hale Fire, Pack Politics, Panic Attacks, Slight Dom/Sub, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Trans Character, Unreliable Narrator, Victim Blaming, Whump, bladder desperation, the sheriff dies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-25
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2018-04-11 03:13:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 8
Words: 57,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4418957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cannibalinc/pseuds/cannibalinc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the worst of the worst happens, Stiles is taken in by the Hales. </p><p>He just wants to learn how to use his Spark, to protect the people he loves. It turns out, everyone wants something from him first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much, [Malapropian](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Malapropian), for enduring this sad story to beta. Happy Steter Week!

John Stilinski had laugh lines like train tracks, crisscrossing from station to station, from sand dune eyelids and a worry-creased temple.

He was rugged like gas stop whiskey kisses and the plume of cigarette perfume at a ballpark. His hands were Pacific Ocean broad and soft, like friction worn suede and threadbare linen. He was gun oil. He was hugs that reached your roots and shook down your acorns.

He planted tomato sprouts after the Easter cold snap like his touch could nourish the soil and weeds could grow from under his fingernails.

He loved his wife.

He’d spend every Sunday in the garage, Claudia’s leather work gloves pressed to his nose, and imagine she was still rubbing grease marks over his cheeks and laughing.

He whispered his son’s name like gospel, like poetry, like wind.

John lived like he never wouldn’t, like the shadow on a sundial never moved.

This isn’t what they say in his eulogy.

—

Ten Beacon Hills deputies work like the hands of a wristwatch, uniform and perpendicular with the gleaming coffin they sink into the ground. It lowers with every snick on its track, click click click, and the preacher wipes the sweat off his nose with a white pocket square.

For him, the procession is practically another baptism.

Stiles closes his eyes. He smells upturned soil, hears the whine of gnats swarming or maybe the preacher talking. The humidity is heavier than his starched suit. His hair curls in the tepid heat, crawling with an itchy tickle over his forehead. It’s almost identical to his mother’s funeral.

He doesn’t care.

All his worst memories are encompassed in the indefatigable swarm of summer thunderstorms and sunburn; there is a roll of crashing over his dad’s grave, wet, black soil pouring from a sharp pointed shovel, and he doesn’t care.

He doesn’t give a speech.

Stiles has little to do with the procession. He hadn’t labored over the details. He’d let the adults tuck him in the comfort of lingering childhood and watched from the sidelines as they rummaged through files to find his dad’s funeral service forms. He’s had them filled out, his headstone picked and reserved, since Claudia died. It’s been expensive, he knows. His parents’ tomb stones shine like baby teeth, scoured to blinding whiteness in the afternoon glare. His dad pays the groundskeeper to scrub Claudia’s epitaph like sink grout, until the grooves are sharp and clean. He imagines his dad will still be paying for it, in life insurance.

God, he wants to go home.

He wants to shower and eat leftover apricot chicken and lay in his dad’s bed. It has the same quilted bedspread his parents ordered out of a catalogue, the first housewarming purchase they’d made after moving to Beacon Hills twenty years ago. It wears the age of wine spills and child prone accidents, and decades of a marriage that never lost its passion.

When it’s over, sudden and swift like a gasp, Stiles receives enough claps on the shoulder from his father’s team that his jacket has the imprint of bereavement and sweaty palms.

Scott picks at his own waistband, grimacing, and Stiles wonders why they bother standing on ceremony for a man who had little use for it. He thinks his dad wouldn’t have given one shit if they had all shown up in sweatpants and spilled bourbon over his grave.

Stiles has been told the earth sings for him, that if he concentrates he’ll hear the teeming colonies crawling underneath, feel his father’s body gently corroding into the life from which he emerged, energy returning to energy. The grave rests; a scab on the grass, the earth interrupted for a man it can’t even hold, and Stiles feels nothing.

It’s silent.

—

“Stiles, honey.”

Stiles stops chewing his thumbnail. It hurts.

Talia Hale is a skyscraper in her black dress. She is placid and patient, and her composure makes Stiles’ waver. He feels himself succumb to tremors, and her eyes shine brilliant red, a steady rumble from her throat soothing on his skin. She strokes his cheeks with wild-stained thumbs. Her shoulder smells like muscadine vines. She hugs like his father, like the space between her arms and breast can stretch from here to Andromeda.

He thinks he can maybe feel something of the graves now.

Melissa kisses his forehead three times, reluctant to let him out of her sight. She’s upset because she doesn’t think Stiles should stay with the Hales.

_He needs somewhere he can just be a kid. He doesn’t need to worry about supernatural politics or spells or_ whatever.

Stiles has been sleeping in Scott’s room, and even though Scott doesn’t mind waking up with his friend wound around him, Stiles is sure he’ll go out of his mind if he stays, idle and gathering dust in the cracks. He had called Talia yesterday begging that she let him take on an apprenticeship, that he was ready to master his spark. He thinks, _maybe if he had learned sooner…_

“Ready?”

Yes.

—

The Hales’ claim on Beacon Hills precedes asphalt and power lines, when houses were erected only if you could build them yourself and indoor plumbing was a dream. The Hale property now is situated on nearly forty acres of towering sycamores and Valley oaks just outside of Beacon Hills Preserve, though technically, the Hales are responsible for that as well.

It takes almost half an hour driving through sparsely populated forest to reach the Hale home. Four houses, Emissary Deaton’s on-site offices, and a large, two-story barn Talia refers to as a tool shed sit in the shape of a crescent moon, all within walking distance of one another.

“It’s part of a full circle ward,” Talia explains, pointing to the six counterpoint poles across from the buildings. Stiles thinks they’re power lines at first, tall, bare wooden posts, until he sees the strings of dried blooms nailed to the tops. “We have bonfires at the center.”

There is a line of people in the center of the circle, a charred fire pit emitting writhing worms of smoke as Talia parks her car in front of the biggest house. It’s not opulent or decorative, just functional and half covered in vines.

Stiles has pulled off his jacket and rolled his sleeves in the ride, and as he follows Talia to the softly chatting group standing in a cluster, kicking up dirt, his bare arms feel vulnerable and he longs for the prison of his suit. To hide the wrinkles and sweat stains, to cover his thin wrists.

“Stiles,” Talia says, gesturing to a tall woman with dark skin and vivid freckles. She is barefooted, and when she smiles, Stiles notices the gap between her front teeth. “This is my wife, Roman.”

“Hello Stiles,” Roman says, and Stiles thinks she’s going to shake his hand, but her palm bypasses his, and she strokes a knuckle over each of his cheeks in turn and twice under his chin. Scent marking.

“And this is Laura, our eldest. Though you know her, already.”

Laura steps forward, just as tall and predator-lean as her mothers, and Stiles remembers when he first met her years ago, when she’d shown up to offer him a place in her pack; when she inherits her birthright. She puts her hands on Stiles’ shoulders and brushes her cheeks on his, sort of like a European kiss but slow and sweet. Her eyes flicker between canary yellow and red, “Welcome, Stiles. We’re going to work so well together.”

Stiles just nods, unable to find his voice.

“And this is my son Derek.”

Stiles has seen Derek around town, more now that Derek has graduated college and returned home. He skulks around with Laura, her assigned Second, with shy glances and soft leather jackets. He once helped Stiles’ mom at the Hyundai Dealership when he was younger. Stiles can remember sitting in his mom’s office, watching Derek pass Claudia cables and filters, jeans stained in oil.

“You know Cora from school of course.”

Cora bares her teeth. It’s sort of a smile. It isn’t that she doesn’t like Stiles; she just always grins like she’s hungry, with all her teeth showing, her nose curled a little. She plays with Stiles and Scott on the lacrosse team and has learned to slow her accelerated healing so she can wear her bruises and busted lip proudly. Her knees are grass stained.

“Hey Stiles,” she gives a half-formed wave. “What happened to your lip?”

Stiles licks over the swollen cut on his lip and shrugs.

“I live in the main house with my kids and Roman, and my parents live beside us. Laura lives in the house farthest from the shed,” Talia is saying as Stiles takes them in, their effortless wildness and simultaneous ease. “When Laura becomes Alpha and begins forming her own pack, we thought you might want to stay with her or create your own Emissary quarters. But for now...”

Stiles turns back to Talia, and she gestures to the remaining Hales.

“For now, you’ll be staying with my brother, Peter and his family. He’s got a room converted from the attic. We figured you would appreciate some space. Werewolves don’t have much to offer in the way of privacy.”

Talia flashes a smile like this is an old trod joke amongst them, because Laura laughs and Cora rolls her eyes.

All that Stiles knows about Peter Hale can be encompassed in a single phrase; Talia’s Second. He stands tall as all of them, thick and sturdy. He’s neatly trimmed, his corded strength softened by a draping, open cardigan and thin v-neck. He smiles like Cora, eyes glowing jolly rancher blue.

“Stiles,” he hums like it’s a tune. “We’ve waited a long time for a new witch.”

Talia makes a noise in her throat. “ _Druid_ , Peter,” she insists, but Peter is already dismissing her with a wave.

“Stiles, you’ll be sharing a house with myself, my wife Donnie, and our daughter Malia.”

Malia doesn’t appear very impressed, her arms crossed, her eyes focused on her phone. She’s the youngest of them all here, maybe fourteen. Her long hair is pulled through the back of a baseball cap and she’s wearing what appear to be pajamas out of which she never bothered changing. Peter’s wife, Donnie, is dark like fresh soil, her head bare but for a hint of black stubble. She extends her arms to Stiles and when her skin touches his, a sudden flare of warmth tingles up his fingers. She laughs in delight at his shock.

“I am trained in emissary work as well, though not as extensively as Deaton. We thought I might be of some help to you,” Donnie smiles, and light seems to flash in her hands like fire or broken glass.

“Wow,” he manages, still feeling out the buzz in his hands.

Peter laughs like barking.

They all look good together, like they fit. Full of fondness and edges that match up. Their footprints are all over the dusty circle, and their houses look well cared for and loved. Stiles feels his face screw up against his will.

Talia rubs a hand over his back.

“Why don’t we unload your things?”

—

The attic room is large and filled with empty spaces that make Stiles want to accumulate things to fill them. The windows are large, the walls a sharp steeple, decorated with slinky canopies that shine sheer in the pouring sunlight. It’s like something out of a home living magazine, the rafters wrapped in unlit, violet Christmas lights; strange, since he’d thought the Hales are Wiccan or something.

Stiles has few things to unpack. The state of things feels temporary, as though he’ll be returning home in a week or two and find leftover burgers in the fridge, his dad’s dirty dishes in the sink, cruiser in the driveway. The house feels so—interrupted. His dad’s unfinished income tax forms are still scattered on the kitchen table, his buzzed whisker hairs still litter the rim of the bathroom sink, his half-filled crossword puzzle is on the coffee table. They wait to be picked up again and finished; like Stiles.

_I’m not finished_ , he thinks, the places where his dad will be on Stiles’ way to adulthood like the untouched corners of the attic; bright and over-obvious.  _You didn’t finish me_.

“How is it?” Donnie asks, gesturing to the room.

Stiles falls back onto the bed and squishes into it five inches, ready to restlessly lie awake for the hours of the night.

“Great. It’s good.”

Donnie smiles and reaches up to tap the Christmas lights with her finger. They simmer softly, then burn to full brightness. Stiles eyes the end of the cord where the plug hangs completely outside of the wall outlet.

“Claudia could do a lot more than I can.”

The breath is snatched from Stiles’ mouth.

“She was being primed for Talia’s Emissary before she passed,” Donnie states casually, rubbing dust from her fingers and approaching Stiles’ perch in the window light. This is something he’s never known, and it is a foothold in the day’s freefall.

“Alan was getting too old, and so was looking to be replaced—”

“Wait, _too old_? How old is Deaton? He looks _maybe_ thirty-five.”

Donnie just smiles. “You’ll have to ask him. Being a part of a pack comes with its benefits for humans.”

Stiles pauses, mouth poised for another interruption. “Like—” he chokes, taking a shuddering breath. He thinks of his mom, waifish, begging for an end. Stuttering out a nonsensical string of words, like tarnished pearls; a chain of old jewelry that leads nowhere.  “Like, extra strength and a longer lifespan?”

Donnie seems to catch on. She places a warm hand on his arm. Her eyes glow golden, and Stiles has to wonder at how unrestrained wolves are at home. In cities and public venues, werewolf behavior is hidden and hushed, children expected to act human and avoid garnering attention. Here, in their territory, their eyes glow like a hearth, their inhales audible and indulgent as they scent everything that the earth holds to distinguish it from what is theirs.

“There are things irreversible even to magic,” she placates, and the shawl of death, its permanence and tangle, settles upon Stiles once more. “Do not think that your mother’s gifts abandoned her in her last weeks when she needed them most. Deaton and Claudia both worked hard to keep her comfortable. It is no consolation,” she concedes, petting Stiles’ hair and not blinking once throughout her speech. “But your mother died because she was sick. Not because anything or anyone failed her.”

She pauses meaningfully.

_You didn’t fail her_.

_You didn’t fail him_.

—

Stiles assumes he’s going to be taken into Deaton’s resident lab immediately. It had been the purpose of him becoming a Hale Ward, after all. He doesn’t join Peter and Donnie for breakfast the first morning he wakes in his new room, the sun like broken rivers on his bedspread.

“Komorebi,” he murmurs into his pillow, the one he brought from home with his father’s pillowcase. It smells like sweat and Zest bar soap.

“Don’t feel bad for missing breakfast, Stiles,” Donnie tells him when he stumbles down into the brightly lit kitchen. “Malia hasn’t made it down for a breakfast since she was ten. We’ve got the teenager routine down. There are muffins and sausage halves in the oven.”

She slings a bag over her shoulder and grabs her car keys. “I work until six. Peter is outside with Roman and Laura, doing something about some old car junk. As usual.”

She pauses, her eyes gentle and simmering. Her calm, neutral irises are black, so black. She raises a knuckle to Stiles, runs it along each of his cheeks and under his chin in a quick series of strokes, exactly like Talia’s wife had the day before. “Have a good day,” Donnie says softly, then steps into the light of the front door.

Stiles munches on a strawberry muffin.

There are pictures up everywhere. Peter and Malia hiking, Donnie with a beer, the whole Hale family standing in a line looking a lot younger. Malia’s middle school graduation. She had shorter hair and wore a button down.

It’s so… wholesome. The kitchen walls are painted a soft yellow, the windows are completely open, allowing the sun to shine unimpeded in burning gales, the birds are chirping…

Stiles puts his muffin down on the bar, leans his head onto the cool marble. It’s stifling. He’s burning up, the sharpness of his sallow misery made stark and garishly jutting in this stranger’s home, himself strangest of all.

—

“Shh, shh, Stiles it’s all right,” his dad whispers, as Stiles shudders into the broad palm stroking his back. Stiles rattles in his ribcage like a canary trapped and shakes until the tide of his Atlantic grief recedes.

“There you go,” his dad murmurs, pulling Stiles away from the hard edge of the counter and oh, it’s Peter, Talia’s right hand man, and his dad was never here because he’s Nowhere, and he doesn’t know how long he’s been in the kitchen like this.

Peter has a napkin he’s using to dry Stiles’ face with feather soft dabs, fleeting and ticklish.

“Everyone can hear me,” Stiles says at long last, voice clotted in his throat. His tears have made the inside of his mouth sticky, dry. He gestures to the open windows. “You heard me.”

Peter sighs. “It’s an adjustment. The culture of privacy is different in a Pack. Your human squeamishness will fade.”

An adjustment; that the sensory limitations of humans allow for more secrets that now, even his own physiology betrays amongst wolves. The vulnerability and humiliation alone set his skin crawling. And Peter calls it human squeamishness.

Up close, Stiles can lean into Peter’s side and be drawn away from his stool until he is seated on an armchair. It’s fabric is thick and a little ratty in some places. Peter has crouched down at his knees so they can look eye to eye. He looks earnest, imploring.

“Stiles, it’s all right to be uncomfortable. My first wife, Malia’s mother, could never get used to Pack life. It isn’t for everyone. I just know a lot of people who would like for you to stick around to find out.”

“I want to go home,” Stiles moans. He feels reverted, regressed. “I want my dad.”

Peter clasps Stiles’ knees through his pajama pants, his mouth a firm, empathetic line.

“I know, son. And not a thing in this world will satisfy that feeling. But we are here for you.”

—

He spends the day in his room, his father’s badge rolling between his fingers and teeth until its shape is meaningless and his tongue is heavy with the tang of silver coated copper.

—

Laura takes him on a drive through the Preserve on their golf cart. They leave behind the sweet smell of a grill where Talia and Derek cook, and break through the trees on a well-trod trail.

They loom, thick walls of a leafy labyrinth burdened with heavy fruit that holds tight and vibrating with the buzz of gnats.

He remembers where Donnie burned him with her magic, his fingertips like sores. He wants to dig his hands in the black topsoil they drive over, feel it bite under his nails. He wants to get his hands dirty. Or to dig his father up.

“When I was learning to be an Alpha,” Laura says over the hum of the engine and crunch on pine and gravel, “I had to learn the breath of the Preserve.”

She inhales deeply, face raised to the light breeze. Her profile is strong boned, dense like she was born to withhold the power of an Alpha; and is.

“I had to learn to recognize the natural push and pull of the life in the land in order to center myself within it and become a receptacle for my mom’s power.”

“Alphas can gain their powers through multiple means.”

This, Stiles knows. He knows it like he knows the color of his dad’s blood as it coagulates on moss and broken glass, just collateral in a Beta’s jealousy.

“But the Hales have always passed it along by receiving the blessing of the Earth. We are Alphas because we are vessels. That’s how it is when you live on a Beacon. I’m never more powerful than when I am listening to Beacon Hills.”

Laura takes a turn that opens into a clearing. The grass is tall, in full bloom. They’re not on a path anymore, and Stiles notices another circle of tall pillars. The golf cart stops.

“It’s the same for Emissaries.”

Laura slows when the far off sounds of the Hale property have long fading to whispering trees and Laura’s soothing voice. She looks at Stiles, her eyes bright red, and he feels small but infinite.

“Do you hear the Earth, Stiles?”

He half shrugs.

“Just the mosquitos.”

Laura laughs. It’s like tumbling rocks or the icemaker as it churns ice.

She gestures to the field of grass.

“This is where we’ll do it when we’re ready. It’s where Packs have inherited new Alphas for over a century.”

Stiles steps off of the cart and expects something when his feet hit the dirt. A shock, a tingle.

A Spark.

“There’s _nothing_ ,” he whispers in frustration, feeling his eyes sting in the swirl of shining pollen and fluttering wings, forgets again that wolves hear everything. He’s wondered often if Laura hasn’t made a mistake, if he’s just as human as his dad. But Laura has always just cuffed Stiles under the chin and grinned.

_The nose knows_ , she says.

She doesn’t laugh now. She walks around the cart to Stiles, wading in the grass, and pulls his face to her collar bone. She smells like exhaust.

“It will come,” Laura whispers. “You’ll be filled to the brim with it one day, and it’ll be the most beautiful thing you’ve ever felt.”

She holds him by the shoulders and makes him look at her.

“Until then, Stiles, I am your tether to that power.”

She kisses him then with dry lips, just once, like his mother used to and a little longer than that. His eyes flutter closed. Her strength pours into his mouth a river, not burning but nearly, and he becomes aware of impossible things; the warm North Pacific stream blowing south along the tree tops, the lingering scent of wild things with fast hearts and small bones, the sharp sizzle of magic under their feet like coal veins.

“You are a part of me now. Your grief is my Pack’s grief. _Fear not, when in the wolf’s den_.”

It’s the beginning of an old nursery, an old Rite.

Laura’s voice is inundated with beehive clicks, deep and roiling.

Stiles’ eyes feel puckered and scorched. Blackberry husks dangling from their vines in a sweltering noon. The Preserve is a muggy dream, out of a Naturalist fantasy, speckled and green. It thrives despite Californian droughts, he knows now. There are no wilting stalks that will not soon be replaced, no dry-rotting roots, withering as they coil.

It’s only John Stilinski decaying then, drying and shrinking in a plot a few miles west; Stiles _feels_ it, without preamble or flirtation. The steam of formaldehyde boiling in his vault from his skin, the purpose of preservation lost on dead men; the settling of the dirt around him, his flesh hardened and—  

—

Stiles likes summer at night. The swarms of bugs have retired, no longer menacing garden leaves and human flesh, and manicured lawns have begun steaming as they cool. It’s breezy enough to leave the windows open so he can lay in bed and listen to the crickets make their peace with another afternoon finished.

His mom used to lie beside him, finger pressed to his lips as she shushed him, listening for owls and foxes. Most often, they heard the wolves.

—

The Hales eat dinner together as a whole, with paper plates and greasy fingers on Talia’s back patio, moon looming behind tree branches. Talia’s parents join them even, an elderly and patient couple who seem to think Stiles is some sort of boyfriend of Cora’s, despite Cora’s very loud denials.

Donnie and Laura sing old bluegrass songs, and Derek, Malia and Cora throw a wiffle ball around. Stiles sits among them but separate, subdued by fatigue. His wires are stripped and exposed.

It’s after their bellies are full, hunger satiated, when Talia tips her chin up and howls. The force of her voice shakes the cup right out of Stiles’ hand, and they all laugh and pass him a napkin before joining their Alpha in her song.

They’re showing off, he realizes, their eyes like fireflies in the dark, blue and yellow and red, and moths flock to their flames, dancing. _For me_.

He smiles.

—

“Where is Deaton?”

It occurs to Stiles to ask on his third day on the Hale Preserve. He’s sitting with Peter by the firepit, shelling pecans, looking at the darkened windows of Deaton’s office house. He hasn’t observed any sign of entry or activity for the duration of his stay, and he had kind of assumed he’d be put in Deaton’s hands the moment he arrived.

Peter cracks a nut open with nothing but his claws, popping half of the sweet morsel in his mouth and the other in a large pan. He’d stirred Stiles from his sleep with the promise of buttery pecan pie, and Stiles found himself incapable of refusing such an offer.

“Alan is attending a druid summit at the moment; in Guadalajara.”

“ _Mexico?_ ” Stiles exclaims.

“Witches,” Peter says with a shrug. “He’ll be back in another two weeks.”

Stiles ponders this. He supposes it’s considerate, that Laura arranged for him to come with time to settle and relax into a new sphere, but he’s so _restless_. He feels as though he has so much work to do, so many things he’s meant to be studying, that the urge to self destruct if he remains idle any longer is a real pressing anxiety.

“Does he… Does he know I’m here?”

Peter nods absently, propping his crossed feet on an empty chair.

Peter Hale reminds Stiles of the dads on Disney Channel. He reads the Beacon Hills paper in the mornings over a cup of coffee, square glasses perched on his nose. His ears are capped with greying sideburns. He wears soft sweaters in the house despite the summer heat, and clean pressed khakis, though he’s a stay-at-home dad with no reason to dress office-ready.

“I like to look neat,” he tells Stiles one morning, leaning into the bathroom mirror and trimming his facial hair with steady hands. Stiles likes it too.

The clean silhouette is sweetly reminiscent of a Sheriff’s uniform.

“Besides, you need the full wolf experience before Deaton has you boiling eyeballs.”

Stiles doesn’t understand Peter’s casual antipathy for Emissary work. He’s seen Peter rub his nails along the streaks of paste at his home’s threshold, protective barriers for which he seems grateful, something created from Deaton himself, but Peter’s overall regard for druids seems… contemptuous.

“What is this full wolf experience?”

Peter grins.

“Camping.”

Stiles naively thought living with the Hales was essentially equivalent to camping all the time. Yes, there are amenities such as air conditioning, indoor plumbing, and a mattress upon which to sleep. But the level of isolation, the amount of time the Hales spend outdoors, has given the impression that one could not in any way embrace raw nature more.

He is wrong, of course.

Peter asks that he pack for ten days in the wilderness, then strips him of half of it when he says it is entirely too much. Laura drives them a mile into the preserve on the golf cart, then drops them off so they can hike the remaining trek. Peter won’t tell him how far they are going.

He’s given a canteen of water, a bag of trail mix and a Preserve map that is so old, the trails are hardly distinguishable and the fold creases are practically tears. He has a feeling it is more tradition than function.

Stiles doesn’t think wolves have a natural sense of magnetism and direction, like pigeons or falcons, who can always orient themselves North, but he doesn’t doubt Peter knows the Preserve by every pebble.   

As they walk over trails that soon become overgrown and narrow, until they disappear altogether, Stiles expects to suddenly come upon a road or the back of a neighborhood, but it’s as though the rest of the world is sealed away. Stiles can’t even hear passing trucks on the distant highway. Their isolation is complete and absolute.

"I don't feel magical," Stiles mutters, the first he’s spoken since the beginning. He’s let Peter steer them, in both their journey and communication, and as they break under the cool tree canopies, Stiles wonders why the land has never spoken to him. It’s nearing sunset, and Peter holds Stiles by the shoulder and rubs a mint leaf gently over his cheeks and on the back of his neck.

“For mosquitos,” he says.

Peter has been collecting fallen branches, stacking them across his shoulders on top of his pack.  They've been walking for longer than Stiles can usually endure, his neck drenched in sweat.

"And because you're not," Peter grunts. "It’s not your magic.”

“I’m a receptacle, I know.” He rolls his eyes. “Laura already gave me the speech.”

They build a small shelter there, out of Peter’s sticks. Stiles learns how to make small prey traps out of string and sticks. How to build a small fire. Peter pulls some sort of meat from his pack’s cooler and makes them dinner with rice and corn. Stiles is starving and eats until there is none left and Peter teases him.

“I didn’t expect we’d have to hunt until at least the third day.”

They settle into their small alcove when it gets dark and the crickets start chatting. It’s a little too warm, and Stiles can feel Peter’s breath on the back of his neck.

“But I don’t feel like a receptacle,” Stiles whispers.

There is a rustle, Peter shifting in his sleeping bag behind him, and a warm hand cups his hair.

“You walked from morning to dusk, with few breaks and nothing but water. We hiked through briars, but you have no cuts. There are snakes and coyotes, but you have not been preyed upon. You’re already _using_ the power in the leylines.”

Stiles breathes out a gasp. Peter’s hand retreats from his hair after a parting stroke.

Stiles drops off before he can even recognize how tired he is.

Peter teaches him how to skin a rabbit.

The splash of blood stains his hands peachy orange and the creases of his knuckles burgundy, a sunrise right in his palms. Peter tells him it isn’t the gore that’s stomach-churning, but the overwhelming smell of stupid mammalian fear, acidic and peppery.

“You get used to it.”

Stiles learns to cut around cartilage and ligament, how to remove the central organs without puncturing the thoracic cavity. The lungs are encased in the film, and so small, inconceivably so. They don’t season the meat as they cook over a small fire, the portions small but fulfilling and easy in the day’s heat.

With a canteen of water in one hand and a knife in the other, he looks at Peter and gestures helplessly.

“Now what?” he asks.

Peter tuts, bringing a piece of meat to Stiles’ mouth. “You let me take care of you.”

He keeps a few rabbit teeth at Peter’s behest, slides them into a small pocket to be jarred later.

“A memento of your first kill. It has power.”

Stiles thinks it’s sweet that Peter thinks this is his first, but he doesn’t want to take away from the moment. He nods.

He doesn’t remember there being any stink.

Later, they hike into a small valley where the air is cool and sweet with wild berries and flowers that are small like baby’s breath and whiter than Peter’s teeth when he smiles. When he takes a step, a flurry of moths and green jumping bugs take flight, aphids scatter, and the blooms he crushes underfoot become syrupy pulp on his soles.

They camp there without shelter, in the center of the field.

“Does this place have power?” he asks absently, mesmerized by the clear creek carved into the flourishing valley.

“No,” Peter says with a gentle laugh. “Some things are simply beautiful.

When they get to the lake, the blazing sun has broken in the way of a light rain, the water made misty and distant. It’s no relief from the heat, the air now burdened with humidity Stiles can choke on. Soft waves splash weakly against the murky shore, melancholy and lyrical on the rocks

“There’s a shallow cave on the other side,” Peter tells him over the _shh_ of the shower, raindrops sliding into his grin. “Are you ready to trudge through the mud?”

Stiles endures sun, rain, itchy bugs and ankle deep slop. The days spent hiking along an unmarked trail, seemingly lead by Peter’s whimsy, bleed into meaningless fits of labor and exertion, where he can’t think or stop or—

There is only the whine of gnats and Peter’s easy commentary. It’s radio.

He wakes up after a rainstorm nude, their wet clothes hanging on a line. Peter is waist deep in the lake, the water crystalline clear and still. There are fishing lures secured and bobbing off a tree stump to the side in the water that Stiles had helped tie and reel. The mud is soft and spongy on his bare feet as he approaches the lake, straw and morning dew tickling his ankles.

Water rushes up to lap at his toes and Stiles sinks in before the bite of the water’s chill can make him reconsider.

Peter turns to him, a half-smile on his face, and everything is glowing blue.

For some reason, Stiles feels himself grow hot around his ears, and he dives into the water. He and Peter swim circles and lines into the water’s surface until their wake creates spiderweb waves for as far as they can see.

“Is there magic in this?” Stiles asks when it’s grown dark and they’ve done nothing but play in the water and snack on trail mix, their feet and hands pruned. His voice is swallowed in the strange silence around the water. There are no bugs but the fireflies further up the bank, and there are stars, bright and far away. “Or is this just beautiful?”

Peter hums, wiping dark mud from Stiles’ shoulder.

“Both, I think.”

—

_It’s for defense_ , his dad says, pulling the slide back. A bullet clicks through the receiver, settles in the chamber. _It’s for intimidation. It’s for whatever purpose you give it, but it is always a weapon, and it is always dangerous._

His dad has a magnetism to the fatal. Stiles knows this because he has inherited it.

The pistol is familiar. Its grooves find the dips in Stiles’ fingers like a well-worn mattress, the slopes shaped to his lax figure. He finds the safety release and slide lock as though returning to an old lover. He’s spent summers in a range, giving humanoid targets pinhole moles; one between the eyes, each. He knows the weight of lead, the slightly raised prick of Sig Sauer’s anchor insignia along the barrel frame, like a favorite pencil.

Stiles aims straight ahead, at nothing in particular.

The deputies think the Sheriff’s Sig is lost in the Preserve somewhere, growing dandelions out of its safety lever and becoming a house for a colony of ants.

Tonight, Stiles thinks it will rather grow in carpet stains.

It’s crusted like rust with blood, and it coats Stiles’ tongue as he holds the muzzle’s end behind his teeth. He never expected to drink his father’s blood. He swallows loudly, mouth open wide. It’s grown quiet in his room. He’s supposed to be at Scott’s, sleeping under the influence of medication. He’s almost sleeping now, relaxed against the wall. The metal of the gun is a cool drink of water before bed. He briefly fantasises the After—being discovered, being mourned, of course he does. Stiles thinks about his dad, how maybe they can have a joint funeral.

Stiles considers. They might even bury him in the same coffin.

He pulls the trigger.

—

_There's been a distress call out on the Preserve, so I'm going to be late tonight._

"Hyped up campers?" Stiles asks into his cellphone, feigning disinterest and rummaging for a flashlight in his desk drawer.

_I wish. Possible mauling. We’re thinking rogue Omega._

Stiles pauses, licks his lips. "...Sounds dangerous."

_Very. Which is why I will not be hearing reports of blue jeep sightings from my deputies. I don't want you within thirty miles of the Preserve._

"I would be halfway to Nevada if I were thirty miles away," Stiles hums as he tucks the flashlight in his pocket alongside a pocket knife.

_Stiles._

"Sure, sure, Dad, I got it. Your deputies will not see the jeep."

He'll take Melissa's Toyota.

_All right. The Hales have gotten here. I'll see you tonight, kiddo._

"See you. "

The trail to the Beacon Hills Preserve Campgrounds is a narrow dirt path so dark Stiles has to lean all the way forward against the steering wheel in order to just make out the edges. He pulls over in a ditch when he can see the glow of firelight and police cars flashing.

There are campers huddled in a tight group when Stiles perks through the bristly thicket. They speak lowly with Deputy Parrish and a man with glowing eyes, likely one of Alpha Hale's. Stiles sneaks out of the bushes and run-flails around his dad's cruiser.

"It looks like she's stalking Talia," the man says, gesturing to whatever Parrish has on his clipboard. "After her power. It is summer, after all. Rogues never have more free time than now."

"Why kill the camper, then? Did she get hungry or something?" Parrish asks.

The man emits a growling rumble.

Stiles edges to the front of the car preparing to dart behind the neighboring RV.

"I resent that sort of speciesist rhetoric, Deputy. She killed the camper to issue a challenge to Talia. This is Hale land, and she sought to desecrate it."

"S-sorry, Mr. Peter. Sir," Parrish stutters.

Stiles rolls his eyes so hard he thinks he might accidentally swallow them. He takes a step toward the RV.

"Hey! You! What are you doing?" Parrish shouts. "...Stiles?"

Stiles whips around to face the trees, his back to them, pose nonchalant.

"I can still see you, Stiles."

He hears Parrish stomp over to him in the dirt and is roughly whirled around by the shoulder.

" _What are you doing here?_ " Parrish hisses with particular emphasis on every single word, his face very close.

"Camping?"

"Are you alone?" he continues as though Stiles hadn't spoken. "Where is the McCall kid? Find one, it's a good indicator you'll find the other nearby. You’re like damn ants and crumbs."

"He's not here," Stiles grumbles.

Scott is on a date, with Allison higher-priority-than-a-mauling Argent, and Stiles has to pick them up from the theatre in three hours in order to return Melissa's car.

"Even better," Parrish snaps and drags Stiles to the cruiser. He forces him into the backseat. " _I_ am going to find someone to drive you home, and _you_ are not moving from this spot."

Stiles opens his mouth, but Parrish is having none of it.

"I _will_ handcuff y—"

There is an abrupt roar in the distance and a series of gunshots.

"Dad!"

He's off quicker than Parrish can grab the back of his shirt. Branches whip into his cheeks, the startled shouts of Parrish swallowed by the roar in his ears and the roar tearing through the night air.

He stumbles upon two wolves, humanoid and towering, ravaging at one another, their wrath toppling long-standing oaks like dominos, their roots snapping under their mighty wrestling. Stiles doesn’t care about them. He squints and rummages frantically in the dark, breaths coming hard in his chest, a stone settling deep in him.

His hand slicks in something wet as he crawls close to the ground. It’s dark but not that dark, not dark enough to disguise the pool of blood smeared into the tall grass and briars.

“No,” he wheezes.

He bumps into something that gasps. Someone.

“Please,” he groans, straddles the prone body and rolls him onto his back.

The Sheriff gapes up at the sky, eyes darting.

“Dad,” Stiles whines. He cups the side of his head where the bleeding is the worst. The wound feels big, fractured, broken. Stiles can’t breathe. “Dad. Daddy.”

_Come on_ , he tells himself, looking around. The wolves are still fighting, viciously and without regard for anything else. _Come on_.

He finds his dad’s walkie-talkie clipped to his belt, and holding his hand down on his dad’s temple, he grapples with the clip, blinking his eyes clear. His hand that gropes along the clasp on the holster slips in more blood, right into an open gash on his dad’s stomach.

Stiles sobs.

“Parrish,” he chokes into the radio when he gets a grip on it.

“ _Stiles?_ ” The walkie beeps. “ _Where are you? What’s going on?_ ”

“Dad—” Stiles bites his lip, hunches over so he can put his forehead against his dad’s chest and hear his rattling breaths go shallow. “He’s hurt. It’s bad.”

“ _Okay, don’t move, stay where you are. There is a flare on his holster. All you have to do is point it up and hit the button on the bottom. Can you do that for me, Stiles?_ ”

Stiles grabs for his dad’s holster, emptying all the little pockets until he finds the flare. He holds it high above his head and releases it.

“I—I shot it,” he says weakly into the static of the walkie.

“ _We see it; we’re coming to get you. Ten seconds, okay?_ ”

Stiles doesn’t reply. He puts the walkie-talkie and empty flare shell down in the detritus of the forest floor and lays beside his dad, hoping if he holds tight enough, his dad will hold on.

He doesn’t, of course. Stiles spends the next minute begging for any sort of help, for him to somehow be able to use the Spark he’s been told to have, that the earth might somehow give life at his call. He listens to the wolves fight until one is dead, the triumphant roar of Apha Talia chasing his dad’s last breath away.

They have to pry him away when they find them, soaked and shivering.

The earth’s power never budges to his begging.

—

Stiles wakes up with wasps in his ears, _bang-banging_ in his head, wings _beating, beating_. He cracks an eye open.

He’s half under his bed, an old sock collecting a whole neighborhood of dust and spiders beside his splayed hand. His skin glows blue in the morning light, fingers curled like little fetuses. The pistol rests beside them. The wasps grow louder.

His phone is buzzing.

Stiles digs it out of his pocket.

“ _Stiles? Are you okay? Where are you?_ ”

“Melissa, hey,” he croaks through a busted lip that tears as he speaks. His jaw cracks, and he tastes blood seeping from his gums. The roof of his mouth is swollen and pulsing, and he thinks one of his bottom teeth is chipped.

Scott’s mom shouts something, half-hysterical. His hands are tender, palms covered in blisters, burn marks. “I’m fine. At home.”

“ _What are you doing?! We woke up and you were gone!_ ”

Stiles looks at the pistol, squinting. There’s something wrong with it. He crawls into a sitting position and gingerly lifts the gun, finds its shape deformed and twisted. He can see the cracked bullet in the end of the warped muzzle. It never made it out of the barrel.

“ _Stiles? Stiles!_ ”

The slide has been released, and the magazine forcibly ejected in pieces around the room. Even the grip is split in two. Stiles closes his eyes, lets his head fall back on the edge of his bed. Of all the inappropriate times his Spark could have interfered; not when he’d been begging on the ground, clutching his mud splattered father, not when he’d been sitting alone in his mother’s hospital room, praying her cold hand might turn warm again.

“ _Stiles, what’s going on?_ ” Melissa pleads.

He chucks the broken gun away from himself in revulsion.

“Practicing magic.”


	2. Chapter 2

Alan Deaton steps out of a brown taxi, a heavy looking duffle weighing down one shoulder. He’s a compact man, though taller than Stiles remembers, and the Hales greet him as one, just like when Stiles arrived weeks ago. Deaton nods to them, glances up to check each of the towering posts for damage, and seemingly satisfied, relaxes.

Talia steps forward, grinning, and her hand smooths over Deaton’s cheeks fondly.

“Alpha,” Deaton greets.

“Alan. Welcome home.”

Talia pays the cab fare and sends the taxi on its way, and the Hales give Deaton familiar hellos to which he replies earnestly.

When Deaton comes to gaze at Stiles, his look piercing and derisive, Stiles doesn’t know what to say. The pressure of his regard is like deep sea diving, dark and eerily silent.

“He’s not suited for this,” Deaton states, and everyone goes quiet. He never looks away from Stiles, even begins circling him in the gravel, acting the predator more than his Pack.

“You haven’t got a choice in the matter,” Laura replies. There is an undertone of thunder in her voice, and the skin on her arms ripples, as though preparing to sprout sharp fur. She places a hand on Stiles’ lower back, draws him in close to her pillar strength. “Stiles is _my_ choice.”

“A little early for ultimatums, isn’t it?” Stiles half laughs, looking down and rubbing his toes in the dirt. He’s taken to going barefoot, like the others, and now he wishes he’d worn something different, something smarter that wouldn’t give away how ill prepared he is for this. Deaton has just come off an international flight, and he doesn’t have a single wrinkle. “You’re not even giving me a chance to mess up, dude.”

Laura pets his hair with a chuckle. Deaton doesn’t so much as crack a smile. His face is smooth, not in frustration or distaste. His expectations are frank, and that makes Stiles’ insides squirm in embarrassment.

“Alan,” Talia interrupts, her head cocking in the direction of Deaton’s house. “I’ll help you unpack.”

Deaton’s attention turning away from him is like getting the bends, his blood oxygen fizzling menacingly once the pressure is released.

“I knew there was a catch,” Stiles mutters to Deaton and Talia’s retreating backs. He feels the gentle and easy calm that has settled into his joints eroding into diminished dust.

“There is no catch,” Laura says, like it’s true, an Absolute Truth, and Stiles believes her. “Deaton will teach you whether he wants to or not. Besides, I’d sooner go without an Emissary than accept him as mine.”

Stiles is actually shocked. “You don’t like him?”

Laura tilts her head so that her chin bumps Stiles’ crown. “His style doesn’t suit mine.”

“But he suits Talia’s?”

“Your mother was Talia’s first choice,” Peter answers. He grimaces, gesturing to Deaton’s building. “Deaton was our father’s Emissary. When Claudia passed, he simply kept the position.”

“He’s a weirdo,” Cora says with a shrug.

“But good at his job,” Roman, Talia’s wife, says, as though she has to remind them frequently. “He will be an excellent tutor for you, Stiles.”

Roman is right; Deaton is very good at his job.

Stiles can tell because the first thing Deaton does is completely ignore Stiles in order to finish outstanding work while he has been out of town. This includes rapidly mixing mystery liquids and making brief phone calls to clients and balancing an inventory log.

His office is perfectly kept, all of his ingredients and supplies shelved in a strangely symmetrical arrangement, like rows of teeth, and every surface is clean and without clutter. It is similar to a doctor’s office, or a chemistry lab, and Stiles is surprised to see actual scientific equipment in a cabinet beside an expansive bookshelf. The line of books, both old and new, are enticing, kept free of dust by a glass screen.

“Man, I cannot wait to dive into these,” he breathes, reaching out for the handle on the glass door.

There is a blur in front of Stiles’ face and a sudden burning sting on his fingers that has him yelping and jerking away from the book shelf. He whirls around to Deaton, who is calm, a glass stirring rod brandished and ready to be used again.

“Dude! That hurt!” he shouts, rubbing his sore fingers. They’re red and slightly welted.

“Rather the point.”

Deaton turns his back on Stiles to place the stirring rod back in the hanging case with its brothers.

“You do not have permission to touch my things, Stiles, and permission will never be granted freely while you are with me.” Deaton turns around, hands loosely clasped in front of his lap. Stiles fidgets under his unwavering stare. It’s weird how little Deaton appears to need to blink.

Stiles sighs. “May I have permission to peruse your books?” He pauses before snottily adding “ _Sir?_ ”

Deaton’s mouth actually twitches into a smile.

“No. For now, you will only have what I give you, and thank me for it every time.”

That sounds a lot like Stiles needs to ask permission in order to breathe, but also isn’t allowed to ask. He wants to take a seat at the island counter, where there are nozzles sticking out of the countertop, presumably for gas and air, just like in his chemistry lab at school, but he’s worried he’ll get another whack if he tries. Stiles feels a frisson of frustration. He didn’t agree to this so he’d be subjected to power games by a man threatened by his replacement. He just wants to learn. He just wants to feel where his dad lies.

“Right. Got it. Anything else?” Stiles huffs. It _is_ Deaton’s house and Pack, after all. He understands how seniority works. He just wishes Deaton weren’t so eager to establish the pecking order.

“This work is one of respect and discipline. It has been some time since anyone has apprenticed under me, so I may seem unreasonably strict. Despite the reality of your capabilities, I expect the best for this Pack.”

Stiles rears back a little at the barb. “Dude, it’s totally unnecessary to keep reminding me of how untrained I am, like I don’t know. That’s why I’m here.”

Deaton tilts his head, thoughtfully, and the blank facial expression is a little terrifying. Stiles is feeling sweaty all of a sudden. He doesn’t know why he’s getting the impression he keeps saying the wrong thing.

“I will not bombard you with rules on this day, because there are many and we have plenty of time to ingrain them into you, but while I am your teacher, which begins now, indefinitely, you will refer to me as you would any other teacher. And I know you can say it. Sir, precisely.”

Stiles nods, bouncing from foot to foot nervously. “Sure, no problem. Sir.”

Roman is also wrong, because Deaton is not a good tutor for Stiles; he is, in fact, the least effective tutor for Stiles possible. This is the worst. Stiles never responds well to authoritative instruction. It makes him squirmy and obstinate. He’ll become angry easily and grow belligerent if this is how Deaton operates full time. Stiles takes a deep breath to steady himself and still his jittering legs, and it only half works.  

"Now," Deaton says, making vague gestures toward the far corner, like shooing a dog. "Be unobtrusive and silent."

Is this guy for real? Stiles shuffles awkwardly against the wall as Deaton returns to work, confused and not a little offended. His feet start to ache after a while, so he jiggles his foot against the speckled tile floor, looking around as Deaton begins opening jars and stirring bowls of brownish-greenish slop. It’s pretty disgusting, and some of the smells that waft around make his eyes water.

Stiles gets brave enough to venture around the edges of the room after an eternity of swaying in one place, peeking into the cabinets as quietly as possible. He sees small boxes, each labeled with a white tag. The nearest reads _Dried Kanima Extract_ in neat handwriting. Stiles grimaces and immediately backs away.

Beside the sink, there is an eyewash station and a shower nozzle, and Stiles wonders what sort of toxic ingredients Deaton messes with and when he himself will finally get to learn to use them. He’s running a finger over a few odd looking scalpels when he’s caught.

“Stiles. I will stick your feet to the floor in the corner if you do not return to it posthaste.”

“Right, sorry, got distracted.”

Stiles stands dutifully in the corner, feigning obedience. He knows no matter what he does, in a corner or not, he’s a test of patience for any adult he encounters. It’s obvious Deaton is not immune to any of this, and is actually more sensitive to Stiles’ misbehavior. He wonders how he’s supposed to learn anything when all he can see from the place is Deaton’s bent head and back.

Stiles is practically asleep, drooling against the walls when Deaton finally turns around, and Stiles realizes with some shock that his table has been completely cleared off while he was dozing.

“I told you to stand in the corner,” Deaton says after hours of silence.

Stiles looks up from his spot on the floor, glancing to the corner Deaton means. He’s slightly to the right of it.

Jesus. Stiles feels his eyebrows raise as he clambers to his feet.

“I’m in the corner. Sort of. What difference does it make? Does this all have some weird hidden lesson, or are you really just this awful?”

Deaton doesn’t respond to this, he just smiles and opens the door for Stiles. “That is all for today. I will see you tomorrow morning at eight.”

“We’re finished? But we didn’t do anything!”

“I see you have a habit of arguing every point as it’s made. Of course we did something,” Deaton says, waving Stiles outside. His hands are stained and well-calloused. He stands in the doorway, still smiling his little condescending smile, and Stiles is forced to look up at him from the bottom step. “I made several jars of bone marrow and moss, and you disobeyed my orders. I’m sure tomorrow will be much more productive.”

The door shuts in Stiles’ face.

—

“He’s the literal worst,” Stiles groans to Laura and Peter as they tinker with some sort of pulley mechanism that might have once been a car part. It’s dark like iron and covered in oily fingerprints. “Total control freak. I wasn’t even allowed to sit down.”

Peter glances up, eyebrow raised.

“I’m _serious_! There is no way I can deal with that amount of torture for that long.”

“Deaton is strict, but he’s not unreasonable,” Laura says with forced nonchalance, like she doesn’t quite believe her own words. She hasn’t looked up from where she’s jamming a screwdriver into a stuck chain.

“You stand in a corner for three hours, and tell me how you feel about it after,” Stiles mutters. He spins in the rolling chair idly, hand on his cheek.

“Um, hey Laura?” Stiles asks nervously after a pause. She looks up from the rusty, greased bits. “Even though I live with Peter and Donnie, you’re going to be my Alpha so you’re like my benefactor, right?”

“Your care is split between me, Mom and Peter, but I’m in charge of you, yes,” Laura says, grinning for a second before she wipes her hands on her knees.

“And if I need something, like clothes or a new laptop, I would ask you?” Stiles ventures, chewing a little on his lip. Peter leans forward and pulls his lip from his teeth with a dirty thumb. Stiles grimaces and wipes his chin. “Ew.”

“Don’t bite yourself then,” Peter chastises, as though he’s done it a million times, as though he’s used to scolding young, self-destructive boys.  

“If you ever need anything, you can ask me or any other adult in the Pack,” Laura says. “Do you need clothes and a new laptop?”

“Oh,” Stiles replies gustily, laughing and feeling nervous. “Nah, no. But, uh, I’m going to be starting school soon, you know? In a couple of months. And it’s sort of a long drive from the Preserve to the high school, a lot longer than from my house.”

Laura nods. “Yeah?”

“I was thinking I’d need a reliable form of transport. Of my own.”

“Man!” Laura grins. “I feel like such a mom right now. You do need a car, I suppose. You’re sixteen and independent and whatever. Peter and I just have a love for the broken ones left in dumps,  but Derek is really great with picking out reliable modern cars. I can have him take you to a dealership, and you can pick something out.”

“Not… Not a new car,” Stiles stutters. The Hales have maybe six cars between them. He doesn’t understand how they afford it. Maybe the make up for it by saving on gas by running everywhere. “I have a car already. A jeep. It’s just, it was my mom’s and it’s kind of falling apart and doesn’t start sometimes. I was hoping...”

Both Laura and Peter are looking at him now, slow smiles spreading over their faces. They look strikingly similar, almost father and daughter. Stiles clears his throat.

“I was hoping we could maybe fix it up together? Over the summer?”

Laura looks delighted. “I think we can work that out.”

It means someone will have to drive Stiles over to his house, where he hasn’t been in three weeks, where it will be vacant and untouched, the windows like dark, hollow eye sockets gaping in an expressionless face. There’s still plenty of time left of summer, Stiles tells himself. No one will hurry him to go.

And Peter and Laura are good with ones left in dumps.

—

Deaton greets him with an empty smile and a firm hand to the back of his neck.

“Good morning, Stiles. I have something special for you today.”

Stiles perks up excitedly upon hearing this. He looks around the room, but all of the countertops and tables are empty of everything but Deaton’s meticulous work.

“Stand in your corner there,” Deaton says, and Stiles slowly, mistrustful in his steps and resentful that Deaton has the nerve to call the corner _his_ , stands in the corner in which he was exiled the day previous. “Keep still now, good boy.”

Deaton hunches, takes out a jar of a dark purple powdery substance, and, with a fine bristled brush, paints a perfect circle around Stiles’ ankles in a single stroke. Stiles fidgets.

“Um.”

Deaton stands proper and imposing again; he is smiling so much more than Stiles has seen before, and it’s making blood rush in his ears and his heart pound. “There.”

He turns around, presumably to concentrate on what ever he has on his itinerary today. Stiles moves to follow; or, rather, he tries to move and finds that his feet refuse to leave the ground.

“My feet are stuck?” he says weakly, trying harder now to wiggle out of place. From the flesh of his feet, to his socks right down to the bottom of his trainers’ soles, he can not budge even his toes.

“There is a place for everything, and everything is in its place,” Deaton hums absently.

Stiles gapes, he can’t help himself. He feels humiliated, patronized and horrified that Deaton would treat him with so much disdain and condescension. “Are you going to keep me here all day?”

“As long as it takes,” Deaton replies, and ignores every one of Stiles’ wheedling attempts thereafter.

—

As long as it takes ends up being longer than Stiles thought imaginable. He is made small and insignificant in his little corner, while Deaton works tirelessly. There are times he is silent and times he murmurs gently to spells he’s drawn that are still wet with ink. Some of them glow vibrant in the sunlit room, flashes of pink or blue before they die with a wisp of grey smoke, like fireworks.

Stiles watches him this time, having catalogued all he can of the room the day before, Deaton’s smooth and well-practiced movements as he reaches through drawers and shelves, familiar and at peace. He makes no unnecessary sound or twitch, every action clearly deliberate. There are no absentminded ticks, no foot or finger tapping. Stiles doesn’t understand how it can be natural. He supposes this is what Deaton expects of Stiles, a soulless limpet to be an instrument for his Pack, but that is impossible for someone like himself.

Privately, Stiles begins to form the suspicion that Deaton may be a robot.

Stiles can see the sun through the window as it moves, the shadows of the blinds stretching and shifting, as though growing in the rays. He thinks he’ll have a blind shaped tanline if he’s made to stand here all summer.

His feet ache, and there is something about the seal that prevents him from leaning upon the wall behind him for support. It isn’t until a few hours later that he realizes sore feet aren’t the worst thing about his situation.

“Um, Deaton?” Stiles stutters, his voice cracking. He receives no response. Deaton doesn’t even pause in whatever he is writing. Stiles feels his neck burn. “Sir?”

Stiles taps his fingers against his legs, twisting his thighs together and squeezing.

“Dude,” he whines under his breath, then louder. “I have to use the bathroom.”

Stiles feels a hot flush creeping up his chest as he waits, but Deaton hardly spares him a glance.

Stiles is used to forgetting to keep up with bodily functions when he’s at home, clicking around on his laptop or playing Mass Effect until he literally has to run to the bathroom or risk making a mess. Both his dad and Scott used to make fun of him for it, openly laughing over how Stiles never learned to just go when he needed to. His dad would walk down the hall and shout at the closed bathroom door in passing. _Did you get it all in the bowl or do I need to bring you a clean pair of pants?_

Now, with the way he is bound in place, Stiles is allowed no distraction with which to preoccupy his attention from the imminence of the growing pressure in his lower abdomen.

Now, he sweats quickly and burns in embarrassment.

“Deaton, Sir,” Stiles grits through clenched teeth. “Can I use the bathroom?”

Stiles looks up at the ceiling, for some kind of patience or answer to cracking Deaton’s asshole exterior.

“Come ooon,” he whines. “You can’t just ignore me all day. I’ve got—I’ve got needs, you know!”

He feels bloated, his pelvis pinching in discomfort, and Stiles rubs over his belly gingerly, hoping to gain relief.

“Your needs are secondary, Stiles. Manage them silently, or I will manage them for you.”

The relief of finally getting a reaction is almost as good as being released from the circle, even if Deaton’s response is less than ideal. Stiles sighs, hoping this weird exercise will be over soon. He can’t readily surmise Deaton’s purpose for this sort of treatment, only that he doesn’t like it at all.

“I would gladly shut up if it meant you’d let me go take a piss!” Stiles shouts, knees a little trembly.

Deaton doesn’t say anything after that, no matter what Stiles yells, and he is left to squirm in discomfort and slight pain. He abuses the English language is any way he can imagine while cursing at Deaton, spends what feels like hours talking until his throat is dry and hoarse until he comes full circle to begging.

He resigns himself to settling in to wait, watching the sun again as it creeps to dusk.

An hour later, Stiles has hunched over his knees, and is now considering unbuttoning his jeans just to alleviate some of the pressure around his waist.  

“Please,” he moans, unable to stand any straighter. “Fuck, Deaton what is wrong with you? I’m about to explode.”

“Deaton, please,” Stiles gasps. “Can’t you take a break from being a huge dick long enough to let me out?”

“ _Uugh_ , I’m dying,” Stiles groans, grasping at his pulsing bladder and twitching thighs. He thinks the pressure will just continue rising without peaking, leave him in a hunch until he is actually crying, but he experiences a strange rush over his body, a weird cool flash and the urgency of his bladder somehow lessens.

This is no comfort and, in fact, terrifies him.

“Okay, seriously, I think something just burst inside of me, something is wrong,” he babbles, skin prickling and buzzing.

Stiles is gasping for breath, lungs stuttering as though the effort to make room among his organs is no longer possible. And still, Deaton ignores him, lets him crouch there in the corner grasping himself between the legs to keep from spilling, until Stiles feels his eyes burn and his heart pound. He’s going to piss himself, or he’s going to die, and either way, Deaton will be furious over a mess being made. He heaves pitiful sounds every time he exhales, no longer functioning at a higher level of thinking. He’s been broken down to basic needs and the agony of being unable to release himself of them.

The tip of his soft dick is burning as he presses the heel of his palm into his aching crotch. He thinks for sure, any second he’s going to let go and soak himself in urine. A single spasm will wreck his control—

“That’s all for today,” Deaton says, though Stiles barely hears him. “You may leave now.”

Like a chain link bursting, the imperceptible weight choking Stiles’ feet vanishes, and he stumbles out of the circle with a desperate wail.

“Please see yourself out,” Deaton calls as Stiles is limping down the hall before he can finish. He is sure Deaton would prefer Stiles piss in some bushes than use his restroom, but Stiles doesn’t care anymore.

He barely has the presence of mind to slam the bathroom door closed as he gets his zipper down and is finally relieving himself. The gush of piss burns, and Stiles is so hyped up he almost can’t relax enough to let it go. He moans weakly, holding onto the nearby counter for support. He feels strangely separated from his body, curled over the toilet seat and still unable to stand; euphoric almost.

Stiles has been high once in his life. As a Sheriff’s child, Stiles has had access to every seized bit of contraband since he’s been able to pick a lock, and the one time he’d actually managed to swipe something, he and Scott had celebrated the theft by smoking it. Scott had almost had an asthma attack, and they’d agreed to no more right before the high had settled in.

He feels like that now, loose-limbed and foggy as he begins to cry. He’s cold with sweat and a little nauseated, and his legs won’t stop shaking. Stiles collapses on the toilet seat when he shaken the last of the urine off, trying to slow his breathing through a stuffy nose. He watches the closed door, expecting Deaton or maybe his dad’s laughter.

—

He finds Peter in his office, a small room off the side of the living room. He’s surrounded by small printed paperwork, and he glides the wrong end of a pen along a page as he reads. He’s wearing thin framed glasses, the silver gleaming in the light and bringing out the sparse grey along his temples. Stiles shuffles at the door, not really understanding why he’s sought Peter out or why just the sight of him in his rolled up khakis and neatly combed part relaxes his frayed nerves.

Peter looks up with slight surprise.

“Stiles. Has the prison warden released you on good behavior?” he asks, smiling a little and propping one leg on his knee. Stiles loses a few seconds simply staring at his ankle. Peter has stopped smiling when Stiles manages to look at him again. “What’s wrong?”

What can Stiles say? How can he begin to explain his day when he can hardly make ends of it himself?

Stiles opts to simply shake his head and take a seat at the little couch beside Peter’s desk.

“What are you doing?” he asks, gesturing to all the papers lying about. It’s a nightmare of paperwork and ink.

“Budgeting. Financing. Filing taxes.”

Stiles pulls a face, and Peter laughs.

“Be lucky you’re in charge of making potions and not in charge of paying for them.”

Stiles shrugs. “Seems like being an adult sucks. Maybe I’ll just be a kid forever and let you take care of everything.”

“As long as you stay a part of the Pack, you won’t have to deal with this on your own,” Peter says softly. “It’s my job as Second to handle the Pack’s finances. And Derek’s job, soon. He went to college for mechanical engineering and accounting.”

“You’re Talia’s secretary?” Stiles laughs, wrinkling his nose.

“Glamorous, I know,” Peter says, removing his glasses and hooking them on the collar of his polo. It’s light green with little blue lobsters scattered over it. Wait. Stiles squints.

“Why have you been wearing glasses?”

“Ah, well,” Peter chokes, and his face turns a little red. Stiles squirms in his seat, feeling unexpectedly embarrassed and hot. “I don’t need them, of course. My eyesight is perfect.”

Stiles nods, waiting for an explanation, but Peter’s lips are firmly pressed together. The man lets out a loud sigh and runs a hand over his hair.

“My wife likes them, is all. Says they make me look distinguished.”

Peter looks pained to admit it, but Stiles can’t disagree. He does look distinguished in them.

“So, like, do you get paid for doing this?” Stiles asks to shift direction, his face prickling with heat. He wants to ask Peter to put the glasses back on just so he can see for himself again.

“Oh, yes. I wouldn’t be toiling over all of these papers year in and out if it were slave labor. Talia, as an Alpha, receives payment from the state government in exchange for handling supernatural problems and life in our territory. She also does a number of promotions for various programs and campaigns. It’s my job to allocate payment amongst the Alpha, myself and the Emissary,” Peter explains. He grins and adds, “We get health insurance and vacation days too.”

“So the Pack is like it’s own private business?” Stiles asks, wondering what all he’ll have to learn in order to fully understand how he’s supposed to be a part of this.

He’d thought being Emissary was just laying Mountain Ash and carving spells into wood. He’s glimpsed all of the log sheets Deaton has to update twice daily, all the calculations required to keep up with the amount of supplies used to the thousandth decimal place. He’s a little thankful he’s only been made to stand in the corner, and he can’t imagine Deaton teaching him how to keep inventory.

He swallows.

“Essentially.”

Peter rises, stretching his arms and back. He takes a deep breath and appears to grow concerned. Stiles shifts in his spot on the couch, wondering just how loudly his scent can broadcast his anxiety. If Peter can tell the difference between his low-level, constant anxiety and the rising worry now crushing the back of his throat.

Peter sighs and sits down beside Stiles, one arm coming over the back of the couch. Stiles looks at where Peter’s fingers brush his shoulder. He has tiny, dark hairs dusting his knuckles, and a gold wedding band adorns his ring finger. His nails are stained dark from tinkering so much with old machinery.

“You are barely sixteen, Stiles,” Peter says, patting his shoulder blade. Stiles can see the beginnings of black stubble on Peter’s chin this close, can almost imagine its texture. “You don’t need to worry about this yet. No one is going to be quizzing you any time soon.”

Stiles looks down at his lap and nods. He knows Peter can tell he’s holding his breath.

“And Stiles,” Peter continues, his hand coming up to clasp Stiles’ nape so he looks up at him again, “when you receive the position of Emissary, you’ll be a man more than prepared for it.”

“Yeah,” Stiles breathes finally, sagging into the couch and feeling suddenly small. He’s tired and raw. He didn’t do anything today but stand and shamefully cry, but he is sails without wind and drifting. He leans against Peter until a waft of cologne stirs into the air.

“Thanks.”

—

Stiles knows a lot about flowers.

It was the one thing his mother seemed to enjoy sharing most as she learned about what it meant to be Talia’s Emissary. On his dad’s days off, they would pack a big lunch into coolers and hand-juice oranges, limes and kiwis into a pitcher, then drive down the south interstate to the agricultural part of the county until there was nothing but open fields on both sides of the road, splashed yellow and red with vibrant wildflowers.

They ate there, a few yards from the side of the road on top of his dad’s police cruiser, and even though every time his dad would complain about getting in trouble with the sheriff for misusing law enforcement property, he never stopped smiling those afternoons. He would kiss the sweetness of homemade fruit smoothies from Claudia’s lips and help them name the different flowers Stiles would bring to the hood of the car.

“Wild delphinium,” Claudia would say, pointing to the purple buds. “It was used as dye and ink. For us, it’s used in protection spells. You can make a long string of them and hang them up. Why don’t you pick some more so we can take them home? I can show you.”

Full, and tired of playing tag in the untilled field, Stiles and his mom would lie in the shade where the ground was kept cool by the tall grasses. The smaller flowers grew there, protected and moist, the smell thick and syrupy. She told him about dandelions and clovers, fool’s parsley and all the different thistle.

She loved the mayweed best, and all the other yellow ones second.

“These are buttercups,” Claudia told him.

“Can you eat them?”

“No,” she said, laughing. “But there is a saying that if you hold them under your nose and your chin turns yellow, it means you like butter.”

“I already know I like butter.”

This would make her laugh too.

“They’re also called Coyote's Eyes.”

Stiles looked at the yellow petals that appeared to glow in the sunlight drifting through the tall grass.

“They grow in a lot of different places but especially outside coyote dens, and over the graves of coyote shapeshifters.”

—

Stiles wonders what sort of weeds will sprout out of his own grave.

—

Malia is the only one in the house when Stiles wakes up, too hot and poorly rested. He thinks about talking with Peter and Donnie about getting an additional AC unit installed in the attic. If it gets much more hot, Stiles imagines he’ll be able to see the shimmering waves of an inferior mirage rising from the floor.

Stiles is still wiping toothpaste from his mouth when he gets to the living room to find Malia curled up, punching away at a glossy, purple 3DS.

“Sonic Boom?” Stiles asks, leaning over the squishy sofa back to peer over Malia’s shoulder.

“Shattered Crystal,” she replies without looking up. Stiles glances at the fancy clock hanging on the wall by the stairwell. There’s no rule that says he has to go to Deaton’s this morning. Or even at all today. Peter had said there’s no rush. No reason to be in a hurry to get to the finish line when Laura won’t be accepting the role of Alpha for another few years at least.

“Wanna play two-player?” Stiles asks, already thinking about his own DS up in the unpacked box filled with various half-forgotten belongings.

Malia lands on a row of spiked barrels and groans.

“Sure, but you get Tails. I’m not playing a fox.”

Peter and Derek find them a few hours later, on the couch and gorged on buttery popcorn and root beer. They have migrated from the couch to the floor, sprawled all over a nest made from the house’s cushions and throw blankets. Peter smiles at them from around the kitchen bar.

“You kids save any popcorn for tonight’s movie?” he asks, holding up a Red Box DVD. Stiles dares to glance away from where he and Malia are battling a Cliff Hanger, and Peter waves around a copy of _Life of Pi_.

“Stiles, you’re shirking your responsibilities!” Malia crows, and a small pillow sails into his gut.

Peter laughs and tosses Malia a roll of paper towels.

“Your chins are all yellow.”

—

Stiles contacts Melissa the next day and asks her to pick him up. She asks a million questions like she’s had them prepared for days. How are you feeling? Did something happen? Are they taking care of you? They fall through the receiver of his cellphone like over-eager bees, and Stiles answers each with empty blooms that contain no substance.

“I need some civilization,” he jokes. “I feel like Tarzan and Jane in all of this wilderness.”

She’s more than happy to come pick him up, despite the drive.

Her boots, the dark chestnut kind with delicate brogue, crunch on the dirt and gravel before Peter’s house. There is no conversation between the leaves and wind, and Stiles thinks Melissa and Talia may follow suit, their mouths thin with gauzy disapproval. Stiles has a bag slung over his shoulder and flush of shame that won’t go away.

He can see Deaton watching from his own doorway, an inert silhouette in clinical white light.

“Hey, hon,” she says finally, running a hand over Stiles’ shorn hair. It’s begun to grow out.

“I’m only staying a few days,” Stiles mutters, unable to look at either.

He hears Talia sigh.

“You aren’t imprisoned here, Stiles. You can come and go as you please within reason.”

“He can come and go _without_ reason,” Melissa replies, so tart it makes Stiles’ mouth water.

Stiles looks up, holding his breath. Talia is sucking on the inside of her cheek, her arms crossed, and looks as though she is very deliberately not saying that Stiles is, in fact, a Hale ward, and is under the jurisdiction of his guardian. There is another quiet hush, as though the Preserve is holding itself still in anticipation, but Talia just steps forward and strokes Stiles’ face. She pulls Stiles by the back of the neck until the swell of his cheek kisses the gentle hollow of her neck.

“I’ll see you in a few days, ” she whispers, and it settles in his pores like the easiest secret to keep, and the sweetest one too.

He feels like the end of a sad movie, being carted away by Melissa and gazing back at the Hale property as they drive away. He hasn’t been in Melissa’s car since he’d appropriated it and abandoned it on a dark dirt road. He doesn’t know who returned it to her or how they even found it in the mayhem of their Sheriff’s passing. There are receipts in the center cup holder, and a napkin with the perfect stamp of Allison’s orchid lipstick printed on it. It’s all the same.

Stiles blows the air vent on his face so he can breathe.   

It’s a bit like going home, walking into the quiet McCall house, and without ghosts lingering in the corners of his eyes; only in mirrors when Stiles turns a certain way and sees his father’s chin. Only in the way he can feel his absence, rather than his consuming haunting.

Melissa tells him Scott is out with his girlfriend and her family, so the house’s only breath is the AC.

The Hales keep their houses hotter than Melissa keeps hers, their windows always open and glowing, and Stiles has seen them peel away their layers as the day grows into full bloom, the sun high and searing. He’s watched Peter relieve himself of his wool cardigans for sweat soaked undershirts, like churning dried topsoil for the moist clay beneath.

Stiles feels chilled in this house.

—

Peter calls him in the evenings. There is an awkward, belated deliberation in which Stiles wonders if he should be calling him Mr. Hale, but Peter has never minded. He’s heard Talia and Laura call him Pete, seen the way Peter’s nose wrinkles in a way reminiscent of Cora, and they all laugh in that same huff and bark.

“ _Did you have a good day?_ ” he asks.

“I’m covered in queso dip and buffalo sauce, and I didn’t leave the couch once. I think Scott is getting tired of me.”

“ _Maybe you should come back?_ ”

Stiles smothers himself with a pillow.

He says in a small voice, “Maybe,” and it feels a bit like sharing a secret, like this conversation is a part of something farther than the scopes of _hellos_ and _good_ nights. Vaguely, he thinks, _illicit_ , and can’t determine exactly why.

“Hey, Peter?” Stiles asks, rolling over onto his stomach so his head and shoulders hang off the side of Scott’s bed. His fingers brush the coarse carpet, and he wonders if it’s anything like the feeling of trimmed sideburns. “Do you think I have what it takes? To be Emissary?”

It’s quiet for a long time as Stiles runs his fingertips over the wiry fibers of the carpet, back and forth, his arm a swing, his worries its passengers.

“I’m not calm like Deaton or a natural like my mom. I can’t do _anything_ with my Spark when I try. I have ADHD. I can’t even stand still for a few hours while Deaton works without him putting me in time out, and he kind of makes me uncomfortable. I don’t know about his methods, but it’s really freaky—”

“ _Stiles, take some slow breaths for me._ ”

The mattress is damp where he presses his eyes, and his lungs shake like an ignition turning over and over. He feels like his jeep, his skin peeling baby blue, his gears held together with bonding tape. Left alone by Claudia.

“I want my dad,” Stils keens, hiccoughing into his hands. The words are an old scar on his vernacular, revisited often and picked fresh. His phone lays beside him on the bed, face up. He can hear Peter’s platitudes from far away, his voice thin and high through the receiver. The words come through as though filtered through water, little bubbles that tickle across Stiles’ face, flowing upward over his tears.

He picks up the phone again.

“ _—ave faith in you, Stiles. Donnie has ADD, you know, so she probably has hundreds of ways to help her focus her abilities, and I know she would be more than happy to talk to you about them._ ”

Stiles sniffs and wipes his face.

“ _As for Deaton, I can have a talk with Talia if you think you need me to. He hasn’t had to work with anyone in a long time, so he might be overbearing the first few weeks._ ”

“Yeah,” Stiles breathes. “I mean, n-no. You don’t need to talk to Talia. I’m just… I’ll get used to it.”

“ _You’re going to be fine, Stiles._ ”

“Yeah.”

Stiles rolls over again, staring at the ceiling. There’s a cobweb in the upper corner, waving with the breeze of the fan.

“ _All right. Donnie and Malia are back from the grocery, so I’d better go help unload or I’ll be in trouble,”_ Peter murmurs, like he doesn't want to disturb the soft place in which Stiles has sunk. _“If you need anything at all, give me a call. I’ll talk to you tomorrow._ ”

Scott will be home soon anyhow.

“Night.”

“ _Good night, kiddo._ ”

Stiles stares at his phone for a long time, unsure if the radiating sensation from his gut is warmth or vacuity.

—

Scott comes home with dimples showing and feet that won’t stand still.

“Stiles!” he shouts happily, pulling him into a hug by the bones. “Let me tell you about real magic.”

Scott tells him about love that sprouts from a seed fully grown and green. Love that takes the shape of lofty things, lionhearts and arrows shot straight into the air.

“And then she shot a target dead in the center wearing a blindfold. It was so awesome, but I was kind of scared,” he says, punching the buttons on his controller and firing a rocket launcher at the bridge where Stiles is hiding. They play GTA in a lazy sort of half-interested way. “But I think that’s like. Required. To be scared a little.”

“Of your girlfriend?” Stiles snorts, jumping from the bridge to the top of a passing semi truck.

“ _Love_ , dude. My chest is like, always burning.”

“Maybe you need your inhaler. Or a Tums.”

Scott tries to run in front of the semi and is nearly flattened for his trouble.

“Just wait ‘til it’s you.”

Stiles isn’t sure if he wants to fall in love. It seems like most days, his chest is already twisted into unnavigable gnarls, the vessels swelling and the valves trading shifts. He has only ever known the cousin of love; adoration, and Lydia Martin is the resenting object. Stiles once spent a week in the Chemistry lab trying to identify her favorite perfume based on a left-behind scarf. It’s hanging over his closet door, and the perfume is _La Vie Est Belle Lancôme_.

Stiles has heard her Scream once, the night his mother died, and he’s always wanted to ask how it feels to experience death. Her smiles are patronizing coral and her family Banshee Prestigious.

Stiles tends to be too tangled up for parental approval.

Stiles knows it isn’t love the same way he knows the stark look of relief on her face when he finally stopped vying for her attention.

“Allison has a knife collection, you know. Her mom gave it to her for her sixteenth birthday. Isn’t that cool? And she’s got this pin that she uses to tie back her hair when she’s practicing, and _Stiles_ , she _gave_ it to me. I’m going to use it as a bookmark. Or maybe just keep it in my sock drawer. It smells like her hair.”

“Does she smell like honeysuckle and the forest?” Stiles asks sarcastically, stealing a bright orange Ruiner and heading for the airport.

“Yes she does!” Scott snaps. “And candles and berries and all the other good smelling shit. You’re such a scrooge. Do you know how many times I’ve listened to you obsess over Lydia? So be quiet and do your best friend duty while I gush about my amazing girlfriend and blow you up with this tank.”

Stiles resigns himself to Scott’s Romantic nature.

He used to tell Stiles that he and Lydia were meant to be and list all the things they had in common to prove it. It turns out there isn’t much ground there.

“She’s got these little freckles on her shoulders so small, I didn’t notice them until like, yesterday. She’s got like, four hundred lipsticks, and I would sit down and watch her put each of them on if she asked. Her teeth are _so_ straight, dentists everywhere are amazed. She taught me how to braid her hair. Is hair supposed to be that soft? I don’t think so, but hers is. We wove flowers into the braid, and she is the most beautiful human being I have ever seen.”

Stiles chews on the inside of his cheek, wondering if Scott’s energy will flag as the night goes on or catch a second wind by midnight. It fades like a radio station signal’s range, until Stiles hears only static and garbled words that fight for the same second in space.

He thinks of his mom and dad, their tireless affection and high school affair. Surely love like that can only exist once in the universe, and can then only last in fleeting moments, decades blinked into stardust, candle flames snuffed out. Nothing gold can stay, and all that.

“One way or another, I am going to marry her,” Scott says. There’s a dopey smile on his face. “I practiced signing my name, you know. Scott Argent.”

He wonders how Peter and Donnie met. Marriage is as glass, having the appearance of being a constant, reliable thing, while commanding the properties of malleability, fluidity. He wonders how Peter traversed marriage twice and managed the peace that reigns in his home. Melissa used to joke that the first marriage was like a first kiss; for practice. But for someone like Scott, the first kiss is just as important as the third or tenth or last.

His parents kissed like that. The quick ones, the ones that lingered in the creases of their lips, the ones brushed across hands. They all were bestowed with deliberate, unrestrained love.  

He’s never seen Donnie and Peter kiss. They move around one another as planets in their orbits, easy and as sure as physics. He wonders how they do it. In private moments when their passion is only theirs? With dry lips and a gentle, firm embrace? Do they laugh into one another’s mouths when they part?

Stiles thinks Peter might kiss that way.

Scott yawns, still smiling. “You’ll get it when you love someone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thanks to [Malapropian](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Malapropian) for being my beta and consult.


	3. Chapter 3

Stiles struggles with time relativity.

He knows time passes differently beyond the event horizon of a black hole than before it. He knows it takes time for light to travel vast distances, that there is light shining from across billions of light-years that he’ll never live to see.

Sitting on his rooftop, the pinprick stars are cold and impersonal, and he knows they’re all careening across a universe with no edges, and he knows galaxies collide, and black holes of supermassive, inconceivable dimensions are ejected from their homes, undetectable and unpredictable.

The Earth could be swallowed up one day, and it would be so fast, no one would know it.

Time too passes differently beyond the event horizon of death than before it, and now the seconds drag in astronomical increments, while he seemingly ages in a single instance. Where he was once new and babe-soft, he is now aching and old bones. He feels inexplicably frozen in his timeline, because years ago will always be _Before John Dies_ , and today and tomorrow and the following decades will always be _After_. To exist otherwise seems impossible.

The house, in his absence, has aged in this way too. Stiles moves around inside reluctantly, suffocating on the need to not disturb anything, to leave every last remnant of his dad’s life untouched. He wants the whole lot embalmed. The property was paid off last year, but Melissa is already talking about how good it would be if he sold it, let it be used to its full potential instead of seeing it shriveled and pruned.

The idea of another family filling out his home with their noise and messes and conversations makes Stiles’ stomach burn.

 _It’s just a house_ , his dad says, his hands running down door frames with a private smile, admiring the scuffs and blemishes along the walls. Stains they could never buff out, from rearranging furniture or bowling through the house like destructive kids do. Small, dirty hand prints out of which Stiles has grown. His hands still feel so small sometimes.

 _Just_ a house?

They could never leave.

He’s packed more thoroughly this time, the loose strings of his residence coming together in neatly organized boxes, empty drawers, and gaping shelves. All the negative space leers at Stiles, open maws with sharpening shadows and spitting dust. He almost expects fire.

 _It’s just a car_ , his dad says too, as though these irreplaceable things, these possessions that ferment memories into sweet wine, are no different than yesterday’s paper. As though they have an expiration date, and his dad didn’t hold fast to them with both hands. In a way, the house is their tomb, where they kept themselves and the last bits of Claudia, her books and her lipstick-stained coffee mugs, preserved.

It isn’t until now, curled against weather-beaten shingles and a splintered window frame, bathed in afternoon sun that Stiles finally feels like their tomb can get some air.

There’s only one left to bury.

—

“Dude, Stiles?” Scott calls from the yard, waving up at him. The grass has been cut by the neighborhood committee. They left a ‘condolences’ gift basket on the front porch, and Stiles wishes fancy soap and coupons could cure his sense of loss. “I came to help you load up?”

“Yeah,” Stiles replies and stands from his perch. He can see down the whole street from here, like a bird. He eyes the edge of the roof, even though he has no wings. “Come on up.”

Scott disappears from view, and Stiles crawls back through his window to face the gutted room, all his favorite parts about home compartmentalized and labeled, or dead. He’s reminded of Deaton’s shelves, oddly, and shudders.

Scott has to take a puff of his inhaler in between carrying the few boxes down the stairs and out to his Jeep, but together, they manage to wrap up. He thinks that with each box he takes, he will somehow relieve the house of its heaviness, and instead it feels like stealing. Like cutting into a mammal’s belly and looting its viscera. Stiles locks the front door and jumps up into the Jeep. Scott cranks his bike behind him.

Melissa hadn't wanted Stiles to drive out to the Preserve alone in his unreliable Jeep, so Scott is assigned to follow close. The ignition grumbles, and the clutch doesn’t want to release; but Stiles coaxes it to crank and drive with a sweet word and a gentle punch. The interior is just as beaten as the paint, the seats splitting open and the exposed foam dry-rotted. He wonders what can be done to give her a lift, but he doesn’t imagine the Hales would be willing to spend the time to fix it when they see hiw broken it is.

The Jeep stalls three times, but they reach the Hale driveway before dark, and Stiles enjoys the open look of curiosity and scrutiny on Scott’s face when he pulls his helmet off. His hair fluffs around his head like a halo, and Stiles can’t imagine having a better friend.

“So like, is one of these houses yours? Do you get a _whole_ house?” Scott demands, inspecting each one.

Stiles rolls his eyes just as Laura and Peter come strolling from their garage, hauling a large box of broken car parts.

“Stiles!” Laura calls, dropping her half of the weight, leaving Peter to nearly topple. She jogs over to them, kicking up dust and flashing her eyes. “Welcome back.”

Stiles ducks his head as she wraps her arm around him and strokes his face, a little embarrassed with Scott standing right there. He’s looking at the two of them, eyebrows raised, a startled smile on his face. Laura rumbles deep in her throat, an oddly pleased sound.

“Um.” Stiles clears his throat, but he doesn’t pull away. “Laura, this is Scott McCall, my best friend. Scott, this is Laura Hale, my um. She’s going to be the Alpha.”

Laura shakes Scott’s hand vigorously, her smile sharp.”You are welcome anytime, Scott. And you are invited to pizza later tonight. Honorary Alpha’s orders.”

Scott is more than happy to accept.

“Is this her?” Laura asks, stepping back and waving to the Jeep. “Not as bad as I was expecting.”

“Not bad for a ‘76,” Peter grunts as he levers the box into the back of Laura’s truck and walks over to inspect. He’s wearing a soft tank top that offers no forgiveness to his figure, sweat-darkened and thin. There is a dark smudge on his cheek. “Where did you get the top for it?”

“Mom had it special ordered through her work.”

“A family heirloom,” Laura coos, patting the hood. A chip of paint flakes off. “We will treat her right.”

Stiles shifts from foot to foot. “I brought some more of my stuff. Shelves and books and things. I hope that’s okay?”

Peter claps him on the shoulder, forgetting the grease on his hands, his face soft and hand warm. Stiles doesn’t really mind. “Of course it is, kid. This place is your home.”

Stiles feels as though he’ll drift up to the tree line if Peter takes his hand away from his neck, his legs wobbling like harp strings and disharmonious.

Talia pokes her head out of her house and looks around.

“Laura! Quit hiding from me and come help draft this Pack Registration policy!”

Laura’s lip draws up as she takes a long drag of breath.

“Duty calls. Peter will show you where to park the Jeep. Nice to meet you, Scott.”

Talia waves. “Welcome back, Stiles! Hello, Scott. Staying for pizza?”

“Y-yes, Alpha Talia, ma’am,” Scott blurts, flustered. He spins to look at Stiles, mouth gaping. “She knows my name! How does she know my name?”

“Dude, she knows everyone. She’s the Alpha.”

Peter laughs at Scott’s expense, and his hand squeezes Stiles around the back of his neck.

Stiles imagines in some other world, he doesn’t let go.

Scott stays for pizza, helps direct Stiles’ Jeep into the garage, helps him sort through his collection of things, and politely doesn’t say anything about the box full of his dad’s shirts and other belongings. Stiles doesn’t unpack them or spread them around his attic room, an amorphous ghost of an embrace. Instead, he leaves the shirts tightly folded, the box closed. He puts it under his desk, not out of sight, and there for when he can’t sleep or resist slinking out of bed to press his face against his dad’s pocket squares. He wants to seal the scent inside, keep it eternal.

He leaves the box so he’ll know where to find it.

“Stiles? Scott?” Donnie calls from the attic stairs. “Cora’s home with pizza!”

They eat out on Talia’s porch again, mosquito torches lit. Cora is still in her Domino's uniform, her polo untucked and unbuttoned. There are fifteen boxes of greasy pizzas stacked in their own leaning tower. Scott takes four slices, each of a different variety, and settles in.

“I don’t see why I have to be your delivery cow every time we want pizza,” Cora complains loudly, though she doesn’t seem to mind savoring her extra cheese pepperoni. “I’m not some beast of burden.”

“It’s good practice for Malia’s party next week,” Roman replies unsympathetically. “You’ll have the whole family coming down, grumpy and hungry.”

“ _Moooom_ ,” Cora whines.

Stiles blinks, looking at them all, Talia’s parents and brother and children, and is boggled.

“There are more of you?”

Talia outright laughs. “I have another brother and sister and half a dozen nieces and nephews. There’s Roman’s family coming, too. And several unrelated betas we’ve picked up along the way.”

Stiles can’t even imagine it, having that many relatives in one place. He has several cousins in Poland, whom he has never met, and no surviving grandparents. No parents, either. It’s jarring to remember that his family unit is now even smaller than his first instinct, that the humble family with which he began has now been whittled down to only himself.

“Where will you put them all?” Stiles asks, looking dubiously along the row of houses.

“Good question,” Peter sighs.

When it’s gotten dark, and Scott and Stiles are back in his room, the window open to get a breeze, Stiles starts organizing the chaotic mess of unpacked clothes and wires and other miscellaneous items that had seemed imperative to his survival with the Hales and unbearable to leave behind.

“I can’t believe you still have _this_ ,” Scott guffaws, flinging Lydia’s scarf into the air. It twists, loops, like a lone dancer. The perfume has faded, the fibers pulled into a soft frizz.

“She knows I have it,” Stiles shrugs.

“ _Dude_ ,” is all Scott says, shaking his head.

The scarf flutters to the floor, an angry gash of maroon.

—

 _That Martin girl is smart as a whip_ , his dad says. His eyes have that sparkle, and Stiles knows he’s thinking of Claudia.

“Smart enough to stay away from kids like me,” Stiles whines.

_Give it time. There will be a hundred Lydia Martins in your lifetime._

She looks at Stiles like there’s always a Scream perched under her chin when she draws nearer, her teeth clenched but polite, her eyes wide, and Stiles knows there is only one of her, infinitely. Any more would be fatal.

She’s quick to leave behind those not fast enough and the kind of person who dresses for the job she wants, not the job she has.

She dresses like her pastels and pretty braids can soften how ready she is to kill.

She doesn’t expend effort to avoid him; only that she is radiant, and the earth cannot get any closer to the sun than its orbit allows. If they were to touch, it would be at the expense of his skin.

Stiles thinks he rather prefers the distance.

—

Deaton is silent when Stiles appears on his doorstep the following morning.

Stiles is nervous, his skin prickling with sweat before the sun has even topped the caps of the trees, but he sure as hell went to the bathroom before daring to come within twenty feet of the building. He doesn’t know quite what to do with his hands as they oscillate between feeling out his pockets and rubbing diffidently over his hair as Deaton stares at him.

“Good—good morning,” he croaks, unable to keep his foot from tapping against the door jam. He is swarming bees.

“I see you have returned.”

Stiles tries his best not to be bothered by the distinctly disappointed lilt to Deaton’s words.

“So can I come in?” he asks, leaning to peek behind Deaton. There’s an ominous green glow coming from whatever is steaming out of a large basin on the floor. Deaton steps into his line of sight, and frowns.

“Are you prepared to follow my instructions?”

“I mean, yeah. Unless you’re going to glue me to the floor again.”

“Then you may not come in,” Deaton says with unquestionable finality. “You do not get to lay conditions upon your teacher’s authority.”

Stiles shoves his hand in the doorway when Deaton goes to slam it.

“That’s not fair! I’m not some object you get to control.”

“That is _exactly_ what you are,” Deaton hisses, and Stiles is shocked speechless, the rising rebuttal catching in his adam’s apple and burning on it’s way back down. His arms drop to his sides. “You are an object of focus for this territory’s power, and control is the only thing that keeps you from being consumed by it. And you will learn this _only_ when you can put aside your arrogance.”

The door slams shut, a single staccato note in the early morning hush.

“You can’t just—! This isn’t—! _Augh!_ ” Stiles screams in frustration. He looks around, embarrassed, comforted that everyone is either still sleeping or already working, Donnie’s car gone and Laura and Derek holed up with Talia somewhere. Even Peter is trapped in his office, punching numbers and wearing those offensive glasses.

He spins around and rams his fist against the door until his knuckles burn.

“Deaton! Let me in! I’ll stand in the freaking corner, okay?” He grits his teeth. “Please?”

Deaton opens the door. “Do not grow accustomed to lenience, Stiles. Go to your circle.”

Stiles goes. The dark, dried paste is still there in the corner, a perfect circle, and the moment he steps inside and shuffles around to face the room, his feet are sealed. There is a brief flash of white light in the paste as it activates, and a waft of sulfur floats up and disperses.

Deaton’s lab is as immaculate as the last time, his table covered with neatly stacked papers and perfectly aligned tools. There is a row of jars sitting on the edge of the counter beside the emanating basin. He wants to ask what it is, but he knows better than to open his mouth. Deaton might seal it shut for all he knows.

This doesn’t help cope with the boredom. Stiles counts as high as he can, first in French, then in Polish, and lists all the State Capitals, in alphabetical order and again in reverse. He wonders what sort of training regimes Laura and Derek have had to endure over the years, whether Talia has locked them in time-out and told them they were _objects of the land_.

He guesses not.

When Derek is with Peter, is he made to stand quietly, watching Peter sort paperwork and make phone calls? He can’t imagine Peter’s gentle patience giving way for a cold command.

“So, is this like a kind of training exercise? Do emissaries have to be unnaturally quiet?” Stiles asks, unable to conjure distractions any longer. The words are spoken before he conceives the thought to say them.

“No,” Deaton answers impassively. “There is only one person for whom I have issued silence, and that person is you.”

Unbelievable.

“So it is just me you have a problem with.”

Deaton appears to struggle with himself for a moment, and Stiles wonders what Deaton’s capacity for violence is. “My problem is that you cannot resist an opportunity to disobey. That you fail simple tasks which will only grow more difficult as I advance your studies is particularly discouraging. I do not like to waste time.”

Stiles clenches his teeth together. It’s not _failure_. “If it’s such a waste, why are you even bothering?”

“If I had any say in the matter, I wouldn’t be,” Deaton bites.

Stiles sucks in a breath, severely stung. He doesn’t understand what standing in a corner out of the way has to do with learning to be an emissary when he can’t even crack open a book. When Deaton won’t explain anything or talk to him like he’s worthy of human communication. He’s more a dog in this office than an apprentice, and more a scoundrel than a dog. In the same breath Deaton tells him he knows nothing, he refuses to teach him.

"I'm here to learn to be an emissary! This isn't some passing hobby for me. This is my future and—and you're toying with it! With me!" Stiles shouts, legs trembling. He wants to lift his feet up, take a step, so badly. His bare feet are burning within the circle, and he clenches his eyes closed trying to concentrate. To destroy.

Deaton goes very still. He turns to face Stiles, and the air around him appears to settle, dust particles frozen, waiting. Stiles breathes heavily and reminds himself that he doesn't have to be _afraid_ of Deaton, necessarily. He's intimidating, but Stiles maintains the man would never seriously dare to hurt him. Talia is just a house away!

He nervously continues, unable to bear Deaton's merciless silence. The smell of burning rubber permeates the air.

"Like, I'm sorry if you're pissed I'm going to be replacing you, and I'm sorry if you're still upset that my mom left her training and abandoned you or whatever your issue with her is, but that doesn't mean you have to go all Severus Snape and take it out on me!"

He knows he's said the wrong thing when Deaton gives him a once over, fingers twirling the pencil in his hand, as though imaging all the ways he can use it on him.

"You think I am mistreating you?" he asks softly.

Stiles stays stubbornly firm, though his voice is stuck in his throat, and he wishes more than anything that he could walk away.

“You think you’re the victim of some imagined grudge? That the reason I demand obedience and deference from you is because I feel insecure, and not because _that is simply how it is done?_ ”

Stiles tells himself he won’t be cowed, that his discomfort is justified, and that Deaton has treated him terribly since he arrived.

“Your mother and I were friends until her very last breath. Claudia remained my apprentice until she quite literally could no longer recognize what she was studying, and despite it all, was perhaps the most talented druid I’ve seen—something you clearly have _not_ inherited. You have no respect for her practice, and I am ashamed to recognize you as hers!”

Stiles is stunned, cut to the jelly-soft marrow in his bones and unable to draw breath.

“You insist this is your future, your birthright. Then when I have deemed you worthy of my time, be grateful! When I order silence, hold your tongue! And when I have set your education at a pace, do not insistently tug on the lead!”

Deaton’s unflappable calm has been shattered. His stoic face is pinched after raising his voice, high with color and glistening with the thin sheen of perspiration.

Stiles has hunched in his corner, strings cut, completely subdued. He cannot offer a single utterance of complaint.

Deaton sighs, visibly collects himself and returns to his table, his back facing Stiles.

“Do you understand?” he asks, his voice measured and returned to his customary monotone.

“Yes, Sir,” Stiles whispers hoarsely.

He can feel his lips and chin trembling, the start of a full-body shudder, and he knows the beginnings of an anxiety attack like the well-worn pages of a book, decrepit and too-often revisited.

He tries his best to keep quiet, to not make a mess with his dripping eyes. He hides his snuffling and wet breaths in his shirt, his eyes burning with tears and a humiliation beyond measure. He wants to wipe his face, to reach out for the paper towels Deaton keeps by the sink or run to the bathroom, but he is tightly confined, and it makes his heart race. He wants it to stop, he wants to go home, he _wants_...

Deaton very deliberately sets his pencil down and pivots in his stool to look upon him unflinchingly. Stiles struggles more than ever to pull himself together.

“S-sorry,” he chokes. He mops at his face with his sleeve. He can feel Deaton’s derision without looking, unable to face him.

“Go. Have the rest of the day. This exercise is useless if you are like this.”

The seal on his feet breaks with an audible pop and Stiles rushes outside, desperate for air. He stumbles half blind to the garage and crawls into the Jeep’s front seat to just sit and imagine the steering wheel is still warm from his mother’s hands. He gasps, head leaning on the wheel, and he can’t tell if he’s hitting the horn or if his ears are roaring. The Jeep is burning hot on the inside, the seats like a brand on his thighs and back, and he shakes until he thinks his teeth will rattle out of his mouth. He is already branded.

“Stiles? Stiles!”

There’s a flood of air, and Stiles looks up to see Peter wrenching the door open. The handle, where Stiles has locked the door, breaks off, and it’s just another item on the long list of things that need to be replaced.

“What’s wrong?” Peter demands, wedging between the door and driver’s seat.

Stiles shakes his head, unable to speak. Peter takes him by the shoulders, feels his neck and face, his hands cool and dry. Peter frowns.

“You’re burning up in here, baby. Come on, let’s get you inside.”

Peter peels him out of the hot seat and leads him from the garage back to the house and up to his room, wiping his face with a cool rag.

“Did something happen?” Peter asks when he sits Stiles down on his bed and pets at his hair. Stiles opens his mouth and chokes out a stuttering string of unintelligible consonants.

“Okay, okay, it’s okay,” Peter murmurs, and tucks Stiles into the curve under his arm and rubs his shoulder up and down, a steady pull, like a gentle undertow that you can feel even after leaving the ocean. “You don’t have to say anything, I’ve got you.”

Stiles clings to Peter’s side, fingers tangled in the belt loops of his shorts, and Peter doesn’t complain once while he holds him, even as Stiles gets his shirt wet and can’t form a single coherent sentence. He doesn’t know how long they sit like that, Peter shushing him with gentle phrases and a low voice. No one comes looking for them.

Stiles wants to ask how Peter found him.

How does he always know?

They lean against Stiles’ pillows until they stick together from the heat. Stiles tucks his face against Peter’s collar, his mouth pressed into the soft fabric of his shirt. He can feel Peter’s pulse on his lips.

“I’ve got you, baby.”

—

“I don’t care for  _traditional_ instruction, or for you. Your tradition induced a panic attack.”

Stiles pauses on the stairs. He sees Laura’s back facing him, Talia, Deaton, and Peter huddled close. Peter continues to lay into Deaton, his voice sharp and unforgiving. He doesn’t yell, but he does gesticulate with his hands, his face as close to a snarl Stiles has ever seen on him. It’s disconcerting.

“Stiles is going to be exposed to very strong and caustic magic as he embarks on this path,” Deaton replies very carefully, his tone clipped. Stiles can imagine that same pinched expression taking over, and it makes his stomach churn. “His training is required to be extensive and taxing. If he cannot handle it, it is hardly the fault of the curriculum.”

Peter turns to appeal to Laura with diminishing patience. “He is in misery. He reeks of stress. I found him practically nonverbal today.”

“Mom,” Laura interjects, sounding worried.

Talia sighs. “I will talk to Stiles. And then I will consult other Emissaries on this, Deaton. Some middle ground is bound to be discovered along the way, and I’m sure you haven’t made the best of efforts to communicate clearly with Stiles.”

“Yes, Alpha,” Deaton responds conspicuously without inflection.

Stiles slinks quietly back up the stairs, unable to stomach any more. His face is still creased with the folds of his sheets, his eyes sore and itchy.

He doesn’t go back to Deaton’s in the following days, and Talia never appears to Stiles for that talk.

—

Donnie’s parents arrive a little before noon as Laura and Peter work on the engine of  the Jeep.

“Looks like this is the model before AMC reduced their engine weight,” Laura grunts from under the hood. “This intake manifold is usually aluminium. Yours has got a crack, so I think we’ll replace it with the lighter version. You’ve got twelve counterweights, _Jesus_.”

Stiles sits on a table, swinging his legs. He knows vaguely what these parts are from hearing his mom and her coworkers talking loudly over the groan of machinery. He used to spend all summer sitting in her office, following her around, passing her a tool box he could barely lift.

“When was the last time the oil was changed?” Peter calls from where he has rolled under the suspended Jeep. “It’s coming out like burned ground beef.”

“You’re gonna make me hurl, Pete,” Laura complains.

“Um, maybe like. The last time my mom drove it?”

“Well, I’m happy you survived driving it at all,” Peter mutters, rolling out from underneath the oil pan, where it drips lumpy sludge into a waste container.

“I have you to look out for me, at least,” Stiles shrugs, feeling his cheeks go warm. He doesn’t look at Laura, unable to pinpoint why he’s afraid to.

Peter smiles. “At least.”

“Hell-ooo,” a voice calls. “Is that you in there, Peter?”

Peter cranes his neck “Ah. The in-laws.”

He hauls himself to his feet and gestures for both Laura and Stiles to come out with him. They round the Jeep and find a couple climbing out of a cab. Stiles can instantly tell they’re Donnie’s parents. They share a chic litheness that gives them an impression of power and wealth. He wonders if they’re human.

“Felix! Galena!” Peter rushes forward happily, taking their bags. “I’d hug you, but as you can see, I’m all greased out. How was your flight? Donnie told me you weren’t getting in until tomorrow.”

“Our flight got upgraded. Where is Donaver?” Donnie’s mother asks.

Donnie’s parents follow Peter until he sets their luggage through the front door of his parents’ house. Laura grabs the rest of their luggage from the cabbie and follows suit.

“Work. You’ll be staying in my parents’ house this time,” Peter is telling them while he pulls out his wallet and covers the taxi fare. “We thought you’d appreciate a retreat from all the kids that are soon to arrive.”

Peter turns and snags Stiles by the shoulder. “Stiles this is Mr. and Mrs. Schassler, my parents-in-law. This is Stiles, our latest addition to the pack. He is training to be Laura’s Emissary.”

Stiles waves awkwardly, and they seem to find it charming.

“I’ll show you your room?” Peter says, and they disappear into the Hale Senior house.

“That’ll be the last we see of him until the party,” Laura mutters, rolling her eyes. “He’s so far up their asses. It’s like he’s still trying impress them.”

Stiles looks out at the house for a long time, but Peter doesn’t return.

Talia and Peter’s sister arrives with her partner and their three children, each of them more hyper and louder than the next. They are Valerie and Peony Hale, with Senna, Patrick, Aggie and Risa. Stiles promptly forgets their names, and Laura lets him hide with her in the garage, where the kids aren’t allowed to go because it’s ‘grown-up stuff’.

“Why is Peter still trying to impress his in-laws?” Stiles asks, passing Laura a valve spring compressor.

“Ah. Every few years, there’s West Coast Werewolf Association gathering. Thousands of territorial, schmoozing werewolves in one place,” Laura tells him, head bent low over the Jeep’s engine. “Anyway, there was one about ten years ago. Donnie’s parents were there, because they wanted Donnie to meet some well-off Alpha to marry.”

“Holy shit,” Stiles exclaims. “They’re like _Downton Abbey_ lords or something.”

“Pretty much,” Laura admits. “Anyway, I guess the single Alpha pool wasn’t looking so great, so they approached Mom about propositioning me since I’d be the next Beacon Hills Alpha, provided I don’t croak any time soon.”

“Wow.”

Laura laughs, nodding.

“I wasn’t exactly eager to marry at eighteen and especially not to a stranger. Not that Donnie isn’t attractive, but she’s a little older than I look for in a partner. Peter and Donnie hit it off like wet on water, though. Donnie’s parents _hated_ it. A beta, divorcé, _and_ a single dad? You can imagine the tension their union brought.”

“Jesus. I thought they were a Disney couple _before_. This is like, classic star-crossed lovers. Do they hate Peter?”

Laura shakes her head. “More like it’s unbearably awkward for them, facing my rejection. Rich people can’t stand rejection.” She grins. “I would know.”

—

As the sun sets, Roman’s parents and brother arrive out of the woods with three Betas, barefooted and sun darkened. They howl when they arrive and rub orange clay over Roman’s forehead.

The last to arrive is James, Talia’s youngest brother, who brings his wife, their boyfriend, and three children. Stiles doesn’t know how to keep up with all of them.

There isn’t an empty room by the end of the afternoon, the rooms pushing to accommodate over thirty people. Every house is filled with busy adults, yanking out armfuls of party favors and streamers. Malia is barred from going behind the houses where they are erecting lights and colorful balloons. Stiles peeks around a window to watch Deaton making chalk marks on Talia’s large patio, the surrounding trees beginning to shine softly from their leaves with opalescent, glittering light. Stiles briefly considers seeking shelter in Deaton’s house and office, if only to have a couple of hours without the loud chatter of children, squealing and bickering and touching _everything_. He changes his mind when he later sees Deaton speaking quietly with Laura behind the garage, her face thunderous and head shaking. He doesn’t hear what they’re discussing, and he doesn’t care to.

Cora begs Stiles to share his room with her, and Stiles is quick to agree, since his other option had been to room with twelve-year-old twins. Malia isn’t very happy with her arrangement either, her bed commandeered by three giggling nine year olds. She winds up sneaking up Stiles’ attic stairs around midnight, a look of desperation on her face. She flops down on Cora’s air mattress with a huge sigh.

“I change my mind,” she groans. “I don’t want a party.”

“Oh, yeah,” Stiles says without looking away from his laptop. He and Scott are playing _Don’t Starve Together_. “It’s like, your birthday?”

“Sort of,” Malia mumbles.

Stiles glances at her. “Your… Bat Mitzvah?”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m not Jewish. It’s… At the last Druid Summit Deaton attended, they developed a hormone blocker that works for weres. I’m getting the first injection the day after tomorrow. It’s an implant.”

“A hormone…?” Stiles trails off, as Malia ducks her head and fiddles with her hair. He’s not used to her being shy. Cora is watching him very closely from around her Surface tablet, glaring, just waiting for him to say something stupid. Puberty blockers. “Oh.”

There’s a second of awkward silence. Stiles tries to recover from looking so surprised. He feels a little guilty because he knows he’s been unapologetically self-absorbed. He honestly hadn’t noticed, and this is the first time he’s spent any lengthy period of time with Cora and Malia.

“That’s awesome,” he finally says. “Congratulations.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Malia mumbles, even though it obviously is. It’s a huge deal, not only for Malia, but the entire supernatural community at large. Hormone blockers that work for weres is an unspeakably grand success for medical advancement.

“Let’s watch _Sense8_ ,” Cora says, leaping up from her air mattress to Stiles’ bed and stealing two of his three pillows. Stiles shrugs, and that’s how he wakes up the following morning with Malia drooling on his arm and Cora’s leg jabbing into his guts. He never considered how much hair girls can have until he yawns and gets a mouthful of it. His laptop is still open, a furnace on his chest, and all of the sheets and blankets have been kicked down to the bottom of the bed.

“Knock, knock,” Donnie calls, peeking over the stairs. “Breakfast is ready. Can you sleepyheads be coerced from bed for some waffles?”

Malia snorts and wipes her face. She faceplants into a pillow.

“I’m up,” she croaks into the stuffing.

“Dude, I can smell your morning breath from here,” Cora complains, slinging her own pillow around to whack Malia in the back.

Eventually, in between disgruntled and incoherent mumbling, the three of them make it down stairs and take the short trek to Talia’s. It’s still cool outside, the breeze mild.

Everyone is already out on the porch or out in the yard, and when Malia steps out into the light in her rumpled pajamas they all cheer and wrap her in some kind of robe, fur lined and embellished with gold embroidery. She looks a little embarrassed as she’s seated at the center table, her stack of waffles lit with a bright orange candle that burns different color flames and emits popping sparks. Talia snaps a picture of every face she makes, and Peter swoops down to plant a big kiss on Malia’s cheek. There’s a banner over the door that reads _Malia Nicole Hale_.

“Thanks, Daddy,” she whispers to Peter and hugs his neck, sniffing along his jaw. Peter pets her sleek hair and kisses the top of her head, and Stiles looks away.

He sits down beside Laura, who grins and wraps her arm over his shoulders. He gets passed a plate of waffles. They’re topped with whipped cream and currant berries. He can’t explain why it makes him sad.

Donnie pops up behind Malia and slips a party hat on her, snapping the elastic string under her chin. Malia complains, mouth full, but she leaves the triangle hat on.

They grin into the camera, their smiles effortless and glowing.

“Thank you for coming everyone,” Donnie starts what’s probably the beginning of a speech. “Mostly, I think I’d like to thank Alan. We knew when Malia told us four years ago that we had made a fundamental error with her identity, that we wanted to do everything we can to help make up for it. We learned about different options together, and Alan has spent the last few years working with other chemists and druids to create those kinds of options for non-human physiology. He has cared for this Pack a long time, and he continues to do so even now.”

Stiles glances back at Deaton, who nods from the side and Malia smiles at him tremulously. He knows Deaton does his part, but it is strange to imagine him working to alleviate individual matters of the Pack when he is so aloof. Everyone is nodding along, like this is just something Deaton does.

“One more surprise, Buttercup,” Peter says and Malia laughs weakly. She’s given a large envelope with the Hale address printed on it. When she opens it, she pulls out a light colored paper with blue border.

“My birth certificate?” she asks, looking up at Donnie and Peter.

“With some important corrections. You’re starting your first year of high school, and we want you to be able to start this new chapter of your life with the name you need.”

Malia pulls it out all the way and reads in a shaky voice. “Malia Nicole Hale, October 4th, 1998, Female.”

Malia wipes at her eyes.

They have it laminated and framed. The celebration lasts all day, with everyone playing soccer and Red Rover and Frisbee. Even Donnie’s parents, who have been forced to remove their satin blouses and dark sports jackets for the heat, are drawn into the boisterous activity. Stiles notices that there are a couple of human kids, but they are just as rough and strong as their werewolf siblings, and that no one goes easy on them or treats them differently, even when they get their share of cuts and bruises.

The food is brought out in shifts, and Cora is relieved to know there won’t be any pizza deliveries necessary, Roman and Derek lifting platters and platters of chicken and burgers from the large grills. Stiles thinks he might never be hungry again.

He watches the families move around one another, engaged and loud, their voices drowning out the sounds of the wind against the trees and whistling between the houses, the chittering of the crickets and gnats rising with the approaching dusk.

Peter and Malia juggle a soccer ball between them, her checker printed pajama pants stained with grass at the knees and Peter’s neckline darkened with sweat. They have the same smile, the same look on their faces when they almost lose control of the ball, a wide-eyed surprise, a flash of teeth.

Stiles wishes he looked a little less like his parents.

Stiles notices that Deaton never engages with the festivity. He lingers on the perimeter, neither unhappy nor ecstatic, calm and quiet. He checks the glowing trees, their brightness more pronounced in the darkening evening, and sits on the edge of the patio. No one offers him a plate or drink; only Talia takes him aside and bestows him with a kiss on his forehead and a gentle and heartfelt “ _Thank you._ ”

Stiles wonders if that is his fate, too. If it’s his lot as an Emissary, to take part in his Pack’s victories and happiness from a distance, if he’ll be made to dampen his enthusiasm and sincerity in the face of Laura’s inheritance. Stiles balks.

He doesn’t want to be like Deaton. He doesn’t want to contain himself in corners or circles or _Yes, sirs_. When Claudia spoke of that magical feeling, the burst of light warming inside her chest, it was with carefree nonchalance and unrestrained affection. Deaton is nothing like that, his smooth face like the uninterrupted plains in the arctic. He can’t imagine ever being so cold.

“Stiles.”

Stiles looks up from his reverie to find Deaton looming over him.

“If I could have a word, please.”

Stiles squirms in his chair. He doesn’t have to. He could stay at his table and continue watching the soccer game. He could go talk to Talia’s sister Valerie, or ask if the kids want to play Redlight-Greenlight. Stiles warily gets to his feet. He glances back over his shoulder as he follows Deaton back to his office. Peter is watching them, his face set, eyes narrowed.

Deaton opens the door for him and offers him a stool. Deaton takes the second one and they sit face to face.

“Alpha Talia has tells me that my instruction is causing you unnecessary anxiety,” he says.

Stiles shifts on the stool.

“I didn’t like. Go running to Talia, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Stiles hedges, looking away.

“Alpha Talia, Stiles. Use the deference she deserves when speaking of your Alpha.”

 _Your_ Alpha, you mean, Stiles doesn’t say.

“And I don’t think that you went to her,” Deaton continues. “Your school boy pride would never permit such a thing. This is most certainly Peter’s doing.”

“Alpha’s Second, you mean?” Stiles bites.

Deaton’s lips thin.

“Precisely.”

He clears his throat.

“Alpha Talia has suggested to me that you and I open a dialogue in order to ease any professional tension, or miscommunication. Despite it being most uncustomary, I am offering you the floor to express yourself. It is obvious you are struggling to settle in your place here. What can I do in order to make that easier for you?”

Stiles blinks, his mouth gaping a little.

“I don’t know, maybe you could start with actually explaining things to me and telling me what you’re teaching me? Isn’t there some sort of syllabus you could print out?”

“All right,” Deaton sighs.

Stiles perks up.

“Pay attention, Stiles. I will not repeat myself.” Deaton takes a steadying breath. “An Emissary’s purpose is to keep the balance and peace of their Pack’s territory. This can only be achieved by being a conduit for all of the varying and, often, opposing forces at play within that territory.”

“This is sounding a little like _Star Wars_ ,” Stiles says. Deaton’s mouth thins.

“Forces like the Earth’s natural power, the Nemeton. Other Packs and magical beings. You must pull these strings as they pull you, and to do this, you must exercise unwavering focus and control.”

Deaton gestures to where Stiles knows his circle is waiting, and even though Deaton is being so open and this is the most he has ever said to Stiles, he still deeply resents it.

“Like wolves, Emissaries require an anchor. However, unlike wolves, that anchor must be internal. You must be unshakable in your core. I am responsible for you, and I will not throw you into the proverbial void when you are so unprepared. The effects on yourself and this Pack would be disastrous.”

Deaton leans back on his stool, crosses his leg. “First, I will teach you to be still and have focus. Beyond that, I will decide when you are ready. Understood?”

Stiles wants to talk a little longer, but he knows whatever floor Deaton has offered him is no longer available, and Deaton is dismissing him. He doesn’t want to be ungrateful, not when Deaton has finally acted reasonable, but this whole experience has become a lecture rather than a _dialogue_.

“Yes, Sir,” he mumbles, glancing down at his hanging feet.

“Then I will see you tomorrow morning, at eight?”

Stiles looks up, surprised that it sounds like Deaton is asking.

“Yeah.”

Deaton rises from his stool and nods once.

“In the future, I will insist you do not skip any of your days with me. If you should have a problem with my tutelage, I would like to avoid bringing the entire Pack into the matter. You are entitled to your complaints, even unfounded ones. You may be candid with me.”

Stiles nods mutely.

“Enjoy the rest of the party, Stiles.”

—

Stiles wakes up in a daze. He’s blinded by the blurry outline of his window, bathed in white light. His dad is knocking on his doorframe, the sound hollow and ringing.

_Time to get up, son._

It’s urgent, Stiles’ heart pounding, but his body is lethargic and caught in his blankets, his arms limp against his chest. The very notion of moving renders him exhausted.

_I’m going, Stiles._

He has to turn over and tell his dad that he’s awake. Stiles opens his mouth, but it’s as though he is speaking from miles away. His voice box has run away, his cords without keys. Stiles pulls and pulls at his blankets with fingers that won’t grasp, fighting an impossible weight.

He twists his neck and shoulders, stares at his ceiling. He fell asleep with the light on, the glare almost distracting him. He twists farther, glimpses his dad’s back as he walks down the long hall to the staircase, growing longer than he remembers. Stiles opens his mouth around the silent words.

_I’m awake._

It’s only a dream.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thanks to [Malapropian](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Malapropian) for continuing to beta.


	4. Chapter 4

There are some things that remain constant.

Stiles’ dad used to tell him there was power in some truths. He waits for that power as he is reminded that the Earth still pivots and spins, but no galaxies spill from his fingers. Or that the height of summer ends, but neither firefly nor frog pays him any mind. And as always, Stiles and Scott’s new lockers are side by side, a simple truth in the mire of otherwise useless physical realities.

He opens the empty metal box that first hazy morning of the school year, voices of disgruntled teens and of a wheezing air conditioner too loud. He wonders if he’s picked up some things from his werewolf housemates. The inorganic cut of the fortress of Beacon Hills High is like the uncomfortable image of starvation, sharp bones, handlebar ribs. It’s unsettling after his lush isolation on the Preserve.

There’s a single, dusty shelf inside the locker, slightly crooked. The interior is streaked with old, yellow adhesive from left-over tape. The torn upper left corner of an unknown photograph, peeled at the edges and thoughtlessly abandoned, clings to the inside panel of the door. He runs a finger over it, wonders after its origin. Sighs.

He doesn’t want to be here.

“You have to decide,” Laura tells him the day previous, face set in a grimace of reluctant confrontation. She doesn’t want to have to ask, to demand things of him. “I don’t mind you needing to withdraw from public school for a while in exchange for an alternative. But you’ve got to tell me before it’s too late to transfer.”

He imagines homeschooling. He knows Talia would do it, having homeschooled all of her kids for their first few years. He can see himself wearing it well, the skin of something housebroken. Uninterrupted days of leaning over Peter’s back in the garage, trading friendly punches with Laura, hovering in Deaton’s office. Online courses. He could stay in bed and read or sleep or hide all he could ever want.

He imagines the crumpled look of betrayal and abandonment on Scott’s face if he ever dared to do it.

“I’ll go.”

And he does.

He leans his head inside the locker, feeling not quite regret but _almost_. His breath glances off of the tin walls, dulls its metallic shine with moisture. He could slide in, curl up at the bottom and close his eyes. He’d fit, folded neatly and sealed inside. Would he burn? Locked in, with the door welded tight— would the heat of his decay steam up the chamber, leak out of the locker vents and drip to the floor? Like an oven.

Or a coffin.

Would Lydia Scream?

“Dude, don’t get lost in there,” Scott laughs.

There are creases etched between Scott’s eyebrows, and Stiles knows he put them there, as though by his own thumb print. He touched his dad’s face like that a lot too; he could match every strain under the Sheriff’s eyes with the pads of each of his fingers.

Stiles shuffles out of his locker, eyes itchy and head swimming.

Scott sighs and slings his arm over Stiles’ shoulders. “Come on. We’ve got English first.”

They bob through the lazy current of students, their collective feet dragging, stalling, shuffling, a chorus of whispers that roar in their cohesion. It falls eerily sharp. They are as a stream of bodies, severing and splitting from the river like a network of vessels to be sorted into their proper cells, neat and compartmentalized, not a child out of place; even the problem ones.

He’s dreaded not knowing what to anticipate in the coming year. His career at Beacon Hills High has, until now, been as a non-person, whose notoriety was due mostly to being the Sheriff’s kid. Now, he’s not even that.

Now, everyone knows he’s parentless, as though his new status has been emblazoned on his back, _orphan_. He can see it in the way strangers, who have never before considered him, now avoid his eyes or smile sadly as he and Scott make their way to class. Their looks are long and forlorn, with tortured empathy. They are silent and palpably morose.  He ignores them. He lets Scott think that he doesn't notice the change.

The very idea of bearing it for the next few hours seems impossible. High school itself seems like an unnecessary hassle, unimportant. He feels shaken. The insecurities and problems he’d faced the year before are evaporated, swallowed up in the yawning chasm of grief.

He remembers what he had thought walking to his new homeroom the year before, things like _I’ll make first line, Lydia Martin will talk to me, Scott will stop having asthma attacks_.

They find their classroom, already half-full and loud with a hundred conversations, desynchronized.

Now, all he’s thinking is how peaceful it must be in his dad’s grave.

His phone buzzes ten minutes into English Lit. He looks at Scott curiously, but he isn’t looking back. From the corner of his eye, he can see Lydia staring at him from a few rows over, but he ignores her. Ms. Blake, their new English teacher, doesn’t seem to notice the noise.  He slides his cell from his pocket and sneaks a look at the screen from behind his notebook.

Nothing.

He huffs and puts it away.

Ms. Blake is drawing a pie chart on the board in bright red marker.

“What portion of a narrative should be dedicated to rising action in proportion to other aspects of the story?” she asks.

No one answers, but she is already spearing the circle with thick lines. For a moment, Stiles is reminded of Deaton and his magical circles,  like she’s sealing them all in their seats, in corners, in places they can be ignored.

“What’s the appropriate amount of suspense?”

Stiles jerks hard in his seat as his phone buzzes against his thigh again.

“Dude,” Scott whispers from beside him, a questioning look on his face. He’s been doodling loopy A’s all over his page.

“Are you alright Mr. Stilinski?” Ms. Blake asks.

Stiles clears his throat, looking down when everyone cranes to see.

“Um. Fine.”

She stares hard at him.

“Then let’s move on.”

Stiles peeks at his phone again when everyone has lost interest and lights up the screen. He opens his inbox. No new messages. A text from Cora from earlier telling him to be Malia’s ride home after school. A picture from Scott of his schedule from yesterday.

“Most stories follow a bell curve,” Ms. Blake says. Her chalk shrieks as it drags across the board in the shape of an arc. “But in modern literature, we’re seeing a shift to more unpredictable patterns. Right, Stiles?”

He nearly drops his phone.

—

“Expecting a call?” Cora asks in the cafeteria, sliding into the seat across from him. “I had no idea you were so popular.”

Stiles snatches his phone from the tabletop and chews on his stale pizza. He counts at least three stares every time he looks around the lunch tables, catching just the tail end of them as eyes scurry back to their places in a hurry when they’re noticed. He imagines he can hear them rolling in their sockets.

“Irresistible, in fact,” he mumbles, pocketing his phone self-consciously.

Scott seems surprised she’s joined their usual two-man table, but he accepts it with the same acquiescence he’s shown these past few months. It seems his calm grows in proportion to Stiles’ entropy.  

“Dude, mom told me to tell you we’re expecting visitors this week,” Cora says, shredding the fibers of her sandwich with sharpened teeth. She chews like it’s a pleasure just to feel her fangs work. “Some sort of radical pack that lives off the grid. I met one of them once a couple of years ago.”

She picks a morsel from her teeth with a talon.

“Totally creepy.”

Scott and Stiles exchange a look over Cora’s claws. Someone clears their throat delicately, and Stiles looks up to find Allison Argent hovering by their table.

“Um, hi, Scott,” she says shyly.

Her eyes dart to Cora who is flashing her a messy grin filled with fangs. Allison grimaces, taking a step back. Her perfume wafts around the table, artificial and flowery. Stiles rubs his nose and wonders if this is the beginning of turning into an organic hippie snob; sensitivity to metal and body spray.

Cora wipes her mouth and rolls her eyes.

Scott sits ramrod straight and nearly spills his drink. “Allison! Hi!”

Lydia is standing impatiently behind Allison, throwing glances over her shoulder at the table she usually sits, where Jackson and Danny are waiting. When she isn’t longingly eying her boyfriend, she glares at Stiles like this is all his idea.

Scott and Allison share a beaming smile, and Stiles has to look away.

“Did you want to come sit with us?” Allison asks, pointing behind her with her thumb and biting her lip.

“I don’t know, are wolves welcome at your table, hunter?” Cora cuts in, cocking her head and raising her brows. Her eyes flash yellow, or maybe it’s the glare of afternoon sun.

Allison’s smile falls.

“Or was that invitation just for Scott? No pack allowed over there?”

“Dude,” Scott complains. “Not cool.”

“It’s fine,” Allison laughs stiffly. “Some other time, Scott.”

She whirls around and has to drag Lydia away from where she is still watching Stiles.

“What the hell, Cora,” Scott whines. “I’m trying to make this summer love thing last longer than the summer!”

Cora’s lip curls, a fang snagging on the skin.

“Argents,” she spits, like that explains everything. “They’re the worst. They lobbied for mandatory public werewolf identification. _Dog collars_ . Their platform was _Human Solidarity in an Inhuman World_.”

“Like, in the 70s?” Scott asks, looking squeamish. Cora rolls her eyes.

“Last _year_.”

“But she’s friends with a Banshee. _And_ a Kanima.”

“Guess their hatred only extends to wolves,” Cora shrugs.

Stiles glances back at Allison. She’s casting forlorn looks at Scott in between bites of french fries. Awkward.

“Hey guys!” Malia calls as she rushes to their table with a tray. “I’m so glad I could find you. This cafeteria is a lot bigger than the one at Beacon Middle.”

She pauses when she sees Scott’s pout.

“What happened here?”

—

When he was a kid, Stiles used to play a game. His parents’ room was always filled with important trinkets and papers, all of these mementos and work-related files that would be missed were they to disappear. As a child, Stiles would pick one: his grandfather’s letter opener, his dad’s gun oil, an open case file. He would take it and replace the empty space with something of his own, a lego piece, a half-eaten ring pop, a torn-out page from the newspaper. And he would wait to see how long it took his parents to notice something had been stolen.

Sometimes, it was the same hour. His mother would sneak up on him and tickle him until he told her where he had hidden his loot.

She died, and he kept playing the game. Only, his dad never noticed anymore, or didn’t care to notice.

Stiles’ room filled with increasingly daring targets. His dad’s badge, the deed to the house. His mom’s wedding ring. His service gun.

Stiles waited, half petrified, half excited, for his dad to finally storm into his room, find him clutching the pistol in both hands. To scream, to _look_ at him.

But the day passed, and his dad never noticed. He left before dawn as usual, and came home late as usual, and sat on the back porch and drank without a single word; as usual.

Stiles put his mom’s ring back in her glass jewelry case, the gun back in his dad’s safe.

He stopped playing the game.

Standing in the corner in Deaton’s workspace, he’s reminded of it again. He wonders, has the deftness of his fingers dulled from disuse? As he is shown nothing but Deaton’s back, he asks himself which of these precious objects in their very particular places would be missed the least.

Other than himself.

He looks at the shelves with their eclectic contents, at the multi-colored jars and drying flora on their gleaming hooks, at the bookcase, the glass shining without smudge or streak.

He no longer has anything to leave behind to make the theft worthwhile.

“I will not be here in the next few days,” Deaton announces without turning. He steadily slices some sort of white lumpy substance that releases a purple liquid. “In order to be present for our guests, I must prepare my office in the city for my absence there. While I am gone, you are to stand every afternoon in your circle for two hours. I will construct one for you outside.”

“How thoughtful,” Stiles mutters.

Deaton places his knife on the table.

“You will be unable to speak for the duration of your meditation assignment.”

Stiles snaps his mouth closed.

“I’ll give Alpha Talia the details.”

—

The Hales hold movie nights every week, all of them crammed into Talia’s living room, furs rubbing and breath mingling. They climb over each other, purring and nipping at one another, giggling in between growls. Stiles wants to melt in their heat, let the scent of soy candles and summer blooms unwind the knots his day has made of him.

He isn’t sure he can do this.

It’s Mad Max: Fury Road tonight, and Stiles wishes for a taste more light-hearted.  

His had nothing but desperation on the tongue and a burning thirst for weeks, and he could do with a little relief.

Talia and Roman stretch out on the floor in front of the TV, Cora in-between them. They pet her hair, her neck bent back as she watches the movie with a doped, lazy look on her face. Derek and Laura are crammed together on a recliner. It groans under their weight, the cushions imprinted with their forms. Stiles has seen the shape of their bodies in the seat of the chair, made over the course of years and years of brother- and sister-hood. Talia’s parents doze on one of the loveseats, their peaceful faces illuminated by the orange desert and blazing sun on the television monitor. Donnie sits beside them, a stack of papers in her lap, perhaps reports from work, that she peruses absently as she watches the movie.

The room is warm, a little too warm, but Stiles has gotten used to the natural heat of open windows and the damp second skin of sweat. He and Malia are pressed together on the couch, her hair sticking to his shoulder. She keeps tensing, muscles jumping in time with the punches. Stiles’ whole body feels loose and disconnected, and he jars with every twitch of Malia’s elbows.

Furiosa is just thrashing Max in the dirt when Peter’s voice filters into the room, his footsteps loud in the quiet strain of an audience in suspense.

“Yes, we look forward to you coming, Deucalion. Our borders are open to you,” he is saying into his phone.

Everyone shushes him, and Peter holds up a hand in surrender. “We will speak later. I’m afraid I’m being mightily chastised by my family.” Malia wriggles to the other edge of the couch and pats the space she’s made between herself and Stiles. “Sure thing, Deucalion. Bye.”

“Here, Daddy,” she whispers as The Dag gulps water from a fire hose.

Peter tiptoes around the others on the floor with well-practiced grace and wedges in, his arms stretching out behind Stiles and Malia along the back of the couch. Stiles is frozen. He was leaning against the cushions earlier, but now he hovers uncertainly. Malia has snuggled up to her dad’s side, pulling his arm down around her shoulders, and it makes something in his chest ache.

Carefully, barely breathing, Stiles sinks into Peter’s shoulder. His heart thunders through the caverns in his body, patters against his skin from the inside, like rain, and he hopes he can blame it on the movie.

Peter doesn’t even look at him when Stiles finally manages to relax, just shifts the swell of his arm into the dip of Stiles’ neck more comfortably; like he belongs in the negative spaces of Stiles’s form. He dares as many furtive glances as he can until he finally reaches up behind him and takes Peter’s hand in his own. He guides Peter’s arm until it drapes over his neck, snug. Peter glances at him with a quick smile, scrapes his prickly chin lightly against Stiles’ temple. Scent marking. His hand squeezes Stiles’ briefly.

His heart races, races, races.

Stiles doesn’t let go of his hand the whole movie, even when their palms grow slick with sweat. He falls asleep and has muggy dreams.

—

He takes two extra Adderall in the school parking lot the next morning and stumbles clumsily into a new day. Sleep is his reset button, and he moves through the same scenes as the day previous. Only today, everything is distant, the looks, the demands of modern academia, the strain of too many textbooks in his bag; distant and seemingly happening to someone else. He pilots his body, but with sluggish and absent-minded hands.

His classes blur together, a tunnel that grows more narrow the farther he walks. He thinks he would rather crawl.

Ms. Blake wears a bright yellow blazer, and the chalkboard is already covered with her looping scrawl. In the center of the board is another pie chart, intricately dissected into smaller portions, all labeled and notated with its own symbol.

“Let’s talk about character development.”

Stiles opens his textbook out of habit, but the words swim on the pages and make tidal waves of his concentration.

“Dude, I gotta tell you something,” Scott whispers urgently, and Stiles nods.

“Yeah, sure.”

He waits for Scott’s text, and within a few minutes his phone buzzes quietly in his pocket. Stiles slips it out, leans back in his chair, and tries to not look obvious.

But there isn’t anything new in his inbox.

Stiles leans forward, glares down at his phone in his lap. He thumbs over his conversation with Scott.

_did u see greenburg’s new haircut lmao_ , from last night at 9;12.

He looks over a Scott, but his friend is scribbling in his notebook, floppy hair hiding his bent face. Stiles checks the rest of his messages, scrolls for an unread alert until… Stiles’ thumb hovers over the conversation labeled _Dad_.

He glances back to the front of the class. Ms. Blake’s pie chart has gained a few slices, and she’s writing something on the board in Latin, pronouncing as she goes, _mortem ortum…._

“Don’t you mean _moribus ortum_?” Lydia asks, arm raised high.

Ms. Blake pauses, chalky fingers hovering. She smiles.

“Why yes, Miss Martin, thank you.”

He opens the messages.

_thanks pops_ , the latest text reads. It’s four months old. He scrolls to the previous texts after a moment of hesitation.

_cash on top of the fridge for pizza for you and scott tonight.._

_stay out of trouble.._

He scrolls again.

_want to explain the new scratch on the jeep.._

_want to explain why youve been skipping days on your heart meds?_

Stiles huffs. All the time he spent trying to make his dad invincible against a heart attack, and never once considered an omega attack. What pill cures critical injuries on the forest floor?

He closes his eyes and rubs his thumb over the words, their emptiness and unimportance suddenly the most profound exchange he’s ever had with his father, now preserved for his consumption.

He types with one thumb.

_When are you coming home?_

Sends.

He looks up again to find Lydia staring at him.

Suddenly sick, Stiles ducks his head, ears filled with a terrible ringing that lasts until it blends with the shrill cry of the bell. He runs for the bathroom, fighting the too-slow trudge of his peers.

When everything stops spinning, the angles of the checkered floor and wall panels settled once again into themselves, Stiles finds himself hunched over in a stall, the yellowed floor tilting and swaying between his feet.

His phone buzzes.

Stiles shouts, a staccato exclamation, rough and angry. He jumps to his feet, digs for his cell, and in a fit, throws it straight in the toilet. He stands there, breathing heavily.

Instant regret.

_His dad, what if he tries to call, to reply—_

His texts, _god_ , his last communication with him, wiped.

Stiles dunks his hand in the toilet bowl, cringing but determined.

He stands there after, the sleeve of his shirt soaked and dripping on his shoes, his cell phone screen dark and unresponsive, and cries.  

He isn’t sure how long he stands there, his face tucked into the crook of his dry arm, when Scott finds him as though equipped with a best friend GPS device.

His head pokes under the stall.

“Dude, dude, Stiles, you ran off before I could tell you! You’ll never guess what happened!”

Stiles sniffles.

“Our relationship grew boundaries?”

Scott sees his face, and his shining smile dims. He then seems to think the next obvious step is to crawl the rest of the way into the stall and envelop him in a hug, soggy sleeve and all. “As if. Like I’d let you stand in a Beacon Hills High bathroom longer than necessary. You’d get ebola.”

Stiles resigns himself, laughs a little. He wipes his face with his clean hand and lets Scott convince him to take his overshirt off. They exit the stall just as Jackson comes out of the stall next to them, looking at them both in distaste.

“McCall. Stilinski. How about give me a heads-up before you make me part of your weird... bathroom-fantasy gayfest.”

“Wow, that’s a mouthful,” Stiles replies.

He puts his fried phone on the counter and starts scrubbing at his arms. He and Jackson wash their hands in tandem, something that seems to bother Jackson a lot.

“I’m sure you know how to handle a mouthful,” Jackson sneers, shouldering his backpack.

“Does Lydia know you’re flirting with me?” Stiles asks, and Jackson slams the door on his way out.

They leave the bathroom when Stiles feels recovered enough, and Scott slings his arm over Stiles’ shoulder.

“Can we get back to me now?” Scott whines.

Stiles shrugs. “What’s your big news?”

Scott grins at him, nearly running into a water fountain.

“Allison asked me to dinner at her house!”

“Dude, no way. Didn’t she just like, freak out about you buddying up with werewolves?”

Scott’s nose wrinkles. “Maybe I’m so cute, she’s forgotten about it.”

“Or she’s trying to convert you. But this is good I guess?”

Scott grimaces. “Mostly? She thinks I should meet her parents. So dinner at her house. With her parents there.”

“They do live there.”

Scott groans. “This is not a laughing matter. Stiles, how am I supposed to face them? You have to come with me and protect me!”

Stiles laughs, but it isn’t because he thinks it’s funny. He wants to say, _I can’t protect anyone_.

“Are you asking me out on a date with you and Allison?”

“Stiles, _please_? This is like, so important to me, but I need your support. I already asked Allison if I could invite you, and she said Lydia will be there too. It would be like a double date?”

Scott must realize this hasn’t persuaded him any more than before, because he grabs both of his shoulders and employs his most pathetic imploring look ever.

“ _Please?_ ”

Stiles sighs. “I’ll have to check with the Hales first. I don’t know if there are rules for this kind of thing.”

Scott beams.

—

There are rules, a lot. Hunters aren’t allowed in Hale territory without an approved escort, and the Hale Pack must remain on the Preserve for certain Moons. There are a hundred different codes for what weapons Hunters can use in which situations, and when it’s legal to even _have_ those weapons in the first place. Hunters and Emissaries can only grow and possess a certain quantity of wolfsbane strains, and can only treat a certain quantity of ash. Biannual government inspections are held and  community surveys are taken to monitor Pack-Hunter influence on the population. Stiles can kind of see why Deaton always seems to operate under thinly veiled seething rage. There are towers of fineprint that make coexisting with Hunters extremely well-recorded and tracked, and incidentally, nightmarish for whoever does the filing.

Nothing, however, that bars Stiles from having dinner with his friends.

“We’re not at war,” Laura says with a snort.

“It’s more like an armistice,” Peter tells him with a wicked grin.

Talia sighs.

“You’ll be perfectly fine, Stiles.”

Laura winks. “Probably.”

“Just don’t accept any food or drinks from Victoria,” Peter laughs and ducks Talia’s elbow.  

Victoria Argent, the Hunter matriarch, opens the door to Stiles and Scott, and she leads them into the sitting room. It’s a normal looking house, no wolf heads mounted on the walls, but Stiles feels a chill as he steps over the threshold and knows, deep in his gut, that he just stepped over a Mountain Ash barrier.

“Welcome, Scott. I’ve heard so much about you,” Victoria smiles, and Stiles can’t help being reminded of Talia. Her attention turns to him, and she holds out her hand. “And you must be Stiles.”

He shakes her hand and tries not to look nervous. At least he isn’t dating her daughter, thank god.

Allison comes down the stairs with a nervous smiles, her dimples showing on each of his cheeks, Lydia in her wake. She rescues them from the stone-cold assessment of her mother. She accepts a kiss on the cheek from Scott and sets up a game of Wii tennis.

“We’ll let you know when dinner is ready,” Victoria tells them and walks out of the living room at a slow prowl. Scott looks over at him with big eyes. Stiles has absolutely no comfort to offer.

As he predicted, Scott and Allison gravitate toward one another, completely absorbed, and leave Stiles to silently edge around Lydia’s stare. She doesn’t seem upset, just icy. Her perch on the Argent loveseat is precarious and tense, her plum-colored shorts just barely seated in the cushions. Stiles has never seen her so flighty. Has never been close enough.

“So how are... things?” he asks. He has no idea what Lydia’s life is made of, what questions to pose to get her attention.

“You’re living with the Hales, now,” she says, ignoring him.

“...Yeah.”

She doesn’t say anything else after that, retreating into her phone and ignoring the giggles and whispered infatuation coming from her friend. Stiles wishes he had the same distraction, but his phone is sadly airing out on his dashboard. He hopes his SIM card, at least, is salvageable.  

Scott is terrible at Wii tennis, but at least Allison thinks it’s charming; her reflexes are lethal-sharp. She doesn’t miss a single pitch. Stiles shivers.

It doesn’t get any better at the dinner table.

Chris Argent is a nice enough individual. He asks Scott all the right questions, the questions that allow Scott to impress: his part-time job, his grades, his mom. Chris listens to him with polite attention and courteousness. He smiles when Allison brags about Scott wanting to go into veterinary medicine and doesn’t discourage them when Allison clasps Scott’s hand on the table.

He asks Lydia how her mom is and how she did at the California Math League.

It’s fine, because Stiles can shovel peas in his mouth and completely avoid speaking if Chris keeps it up. He seems hesitant to engage Stiles, and Stiles can’t blame him. Stiles’ life at the moment, is nothing but a stretch of land mines.

Victoria doesn’t seem to bother with the same care.

“How are the Hales treating you, Stiles?” she asks, and it isn’t a polite inquiry at all.

Stiles swallows, lowers his fork.

“Fine. They’re nice. I have my own room.”

He shares a worried glance with Scott.

Victoria seems to accept this.

“And you’re training with them. To be their witch?”

Stiles shifts uncomfortably. It sounds like a slur coming from her, and he wishes he knew more about what he’s supposed to be learning. He can’t even begin to imagine what he could say in defense of Deaton if the need should arise.

“I guess. It’s not as exciting as you’d expect.”

Chris clears his throat.

“You’re training to be an Emissary. It’s a very respectable position. You’ll be one of the few to have access to the powerful forces that shape our city.”

Stiles would very much like to go back to talking about Lydia’s math league.

“So they keep telling me,” he shrugs. “I’m not exactly Harry Potter.”

Chris smiles, and something about it hurts.

“You’re in good hands with Alan Deaton. He’s always been well-balanced, and he has been around for a long time.”

“Beacon Hills is due for a change,” Victoria says challengingly, sipping her lemon water. “Deaton is too involved in the Hale Pack to provide the balance he has in the past. He’s reaching a point where he can no longer safely keep his position. I imagine it’s why Alpha Hale was so hasty when she grabbed you after your father died. It was very aggressive, to pull you right from the funeral….”

Allison is staring at her mother in disbelief, and Scott is eyeing Stiles desperately, begging for him to somehow make this better. Stiles looks down, uses the edge of his fork to divide a carrot again and again and again.

“If you’re implying I’m with the Hales by force, you can relax. I chose to start my training.”

Victoria smiles.

“The Hales have grown very adept at appearing civilized when they need to. I’m only concerned with protecting you, Stiles.”

“Mom!” Allison exclaims.

Stiles clenches his fist. Divides, scrapes, divides, scrapes, until he has a pile of orange pulp.

“It’s my job to keep humans safe.”

He stands, uncaring for the chair he sends clattering to the floor.

“Protect humans?” he whispers, strangled. “Where were you when—when my dad—”

He can’t finish it. His throat clenches up.

Victoria looks like she’s won something.

“Precisely, Stiles,” she says softly, in an overly sugary tone of voice, like she doesn’t quite know how to wear sympathy. “If the laws barring hunters from Hale property were overturned, I could have been there between your dad and that animal. It’s the red tape protecting dangerous individuals that keeps me from doing my job.”

Allison’s head collapses into her hands.

Even Chris’s face is pinched, disapproving. “Victoria….”

“He knows it’s true, Chris. If you want to find someone responsible for your father’s death, Stiles, try looking where you sleep.”

—

“Sorry I ruined your date,” Stiles wheezes when Scott gets to the open car door.

Stiles doesn’t really remember running from the house, only remembers the weight that left him when he crossed the threshold and the clamor of noise coming through from the dining room. He leans his head back against the driver’s seat and rubs his sweaty palms on his jeans.

Scott just shakes his head. “That wasn’t your fault. Just… just stay here a second, I’ll be right back.”

He hears a buzz, short and jarring, like a cell phone, and ignores it, refuses to look at his busted phone where is lies on the dash, screen dark. Scott speaks quickly with Allison on the porch, her face a waxy mask of distress. They kiss briefly.

She and Lydia follow Scott back to the Jeep.

“Stiles, I am so so sorry,” Allison gushes. “I told her not to go full throttle, but she just can’t turn off, you know?”

Stiles can see Lydia’s pale face through the window, her stare black in the shadows and her mouth open as though taking a deep breath.

“Must really suck,” Stiles mutters.

Allison clamps her mouth shut and looks down at her slippers.

Scott doesn’t say anything as they drive away, just rides in silence and gets out when they get to his house.

“See you tomorrow morning?” Scott asks on the curb, eyes big and sad.

“Yeah, dude. Same as always.”

He grinds the jeep into reverse, pulls away and turns, replaying the conversation with the Argents, imagines saying something else that would make him the winner. Something that would make Victoria stop smiling.

It takes him seven minutes to realize he’s one block from his old, empty house and that he’s been driving in the wrong direction. Stiles punches his steering wheel until the Jeep wails and porch lights flicker to inspect the noise. He drives the rest of the way to the Preserve pissed off.

Stiles sits in the driveway.

The houses are dark silhouettes in the moonlight, with amber-lighted windows for eye sockets. Only Deaton’s office is dark.

He cuts the engine, watches the houses for signs of activity.

He could, he thinks; glances again at the stillness of Deaton’s empty office. He could sneak in, grab a book and read it before Deaton even comes back from town. Maybe find something in there Victoria Argent would _really_ find worth hunting. She’d said _witch_ like a disease. Like an atom bomb. He slips out of the Jeep and shoulders his bookbag.

He’s explosive. Exploded. Shrapnel suspended like a dense fog.

His shoes crunch on the gravel as he takes a step towards the hollow building. His temples are dripping with the humid heat, and gnats swarm above his head, buzzing in his ears, a constant, shrill ringing.

“Stiles?”

Stiles jumps, heart pounding.

Laura is in the open doorway of Peter’s house. She’s watching him, her eyes glowing in the dark. For a second, they look red.

“How was the dinner?”

“Total disaster,” Stiles mutters, stomping up the porch stairs and into Laura’s reach. She rubs her hand through his hair and follows him inside. Immediately, he can hear Peter and Talia’s voices coming from his office.

“...can expect to see traces of increased activity in the local lichen colonies,” Peter says. Stiles spies him through the door, hunched over a map and pointing. “Here, and here.”

“Then we should have a rough trail ready for Deucalion,” Talia says, following Peter’s indications with a marker.

“No days off around here,” Laura laughs.

Peter raises his head and smiles.

“Welcome back, Stiles. Escape the night unscathed?”

He shrugs. “More or less. Victoria Argent almost busted a vein trying to get me on board with her latest political agenda.”

Talia grins, teeth sharp. “Naturally.”

“What’s an Argent dinner without raging prejudice on the table?” Laura asks, still petting him with greedy hands.

“Oh, um,” he holds up his cellphone, sheepish. “My phone landed in a toilet today.”

Laura leans away from it, her lip curled. “I was wondering why your pocket smelled like a porta-potty. You’re definitely not keeping that one.”

Peter laughs.

“We’ll see about getting you a new one in the morning. Good night, Stiles.”

Laura roughly grabs him by the collar to press a loud kiss to his cheek and shoves him in the direction of the stairs.

“Shower that Hunter smell off you too!”

—

Stiles has been to the rallies before.

Sitting on his mother’s shoulders and wearing a ‘ _werewolf united_ ’ t-shirt, he’s experienced the scalding heat of the late afternoon protesters, a sea of bodies all yelling against the tides. People with fangs and glowing eyes and faces shaped with fear.

His mother was often angry, discontent.

His dad would beg her to stop going, that they were growing dangerous, hadn’t she been watching the news?

“You’d do extreme things if you were being hunted too,” she’d say.

The votes came in, and werewolf and supernatural entities became protected under the law.

His mother grew less angry, but it wasn’t because the majority of the hunters moved on. She just didn’t have the energy or mind to be anything anymore.

—

The prospect of school, if possible, grows more unbearable as he phases through his classes.

Allison apologizes no less than four thousand times before lunch, and offers him and all his friends a place at her table, talking over all of Jackson’s complaints. It’s exhausting in a way he hadn’t anticipated, but Scott hasn’t looked happier.

“And you know, I was thinking to myself,” Allison says to Cora, “you’re a werewolf, so what? Who cares? I don’t care.”

“How noble,” Cora deadpans. “You know I can tell when you’re lying.”

Allison’s face flushes. Cora rolls her eyes.

“Whatever, at least you’re not asking if I’ve had my rabies shot. We’re all works in progress.”

“Wow, this table has such a great view of the cafeteria,” Scott says. “Look, Stiles, Coach Finstock is trying to flirt with Miss Blake.”

Stiles feels a heaviness press down on him, a strange weight that can’t be shrugged off. He looks away from where Miss Blake is grimacing at a wildly gesturing Finstock and finds Lydia staring at him, her eyes glassy and unblinking. She isn’t even trying to hide it anymore, and it gives him a foreboding feeling. He doesn’t know much about banshees, but he’s pretty certain having their attention never spells anything good.

In chemistry class, he and Scott pair together, and it’s almost a relief that Harris addresses him with the same whining drawl of contempt he’s come to expect from the past two years. Dead parents, apparently, don’t warrant special treatment.

Aside from Miss Blake, on account of her knowing next to nothing about the town, Harris is the only one who hasn’t given Stiles a single doe-eyed frown. Even Finstock had expressed his condolences in P.E. yesterday in the form of an extra lap, “en memoriam”, and blown the Marine Hymn through his whistle even after Stiles explained his dad was never in the Marines.

It’s going well, great even; Stiles and Scott have managed to properly sketch and label all of the microbes floating around under the lens, and it would be going perfectly if not for Stiles catching Lydia out of the corner of his eye every few minutes.

She stares shamelessly, her pen lying across her blank notebook. She ignores Allison’s prodding.

She stares.

Stiles refocuses the scope, and she stares.

He passes Scott another pond-water slide, and she stares.

He twitches and taps his foot against his stool and cracks his neck, and she stares.

“What!” Stiles snaps, spinning in his seat. “ _What_ are you _looking at?_ ”

Lydia blinks rapidly, as though she hasn’t realized. Her eyes water, red-rimmed, and he wonders how often they’re abused like this. More importantly—

“What do you _want_?”

He’s shouting now, standing up from his seat and shaking his head. His heart pounds. The whole class is still.

“Stilinski!” Mr. Harris yells, appalled and furious. “First week and I’m already going to have to call your fathe—”

Harris trails off, clears his throat.

Stiles forgets what he was so angry about. He’s hot and embarrassed, and Lydia looks scared.

It appears Harris does contain a smidgen of empathy.

“Just. Sit _down_.”

He does, and hides his face in his arms until a clatter draws his attention.

Lydia jerks to her feet, staring straight ahead, jaws clenching.

“Ms. Martin, I see you’ve caught the hysteria as well,” Harris sneers. “Or maybe the other way around, damn supernaturals.”

Lydia clears her throat. “I’ll walk Stiles to the… water fountain.”

She looks at Stiles meaningfully, her eyes wide and demanding. Stiles looks to Scott, trying to discern whether this a dream or not. He’s met with Scott’s wrinkled, confused look. Harris breathes loudly through his nose, his arms crossed.

“Just _go_. And meander yourselves to the office for a write-up while you’re at it.”

Stiles jumps after her, grabbing all his stuff and dropping half of it.

She walks beside him, on the other side of the hall, diligently keeping space between them like any closer and she’ll be swallowed. Stiles sighs.

“Are you really taking me to the water fountain?” he asks her with a nervous laugh. “I know where it is.”

She doesn't answer.

White lights flicker every time they pass under one, and it’s difficult to tell if it’s from her or himself. Maybe their supernatural frequencies disrupt the nature of things. Something to ask Deaton.

“So… did you have a good summer?”

She shoots him an annoyed look.

“If you mean a summer of being haunted by the dead and pretending I'm not losing my mind, sure. It was good.”

Stiles stops walking, irritated and confused.

“Wonder what that's like,” he grits through his teeth. He feels like he might throw up.

Lydia pauses and glances back, her hair a river of fire. She appears briefly apologetic. She turns to face him, and she looks so small and finite in the stretch of hall behind her.

“There’s no training for being a Banshee,” she whispers, looking over his shoulder, expression cloudy. “It’s just navigating these dark tunnels blind, following sensation and the sinking feeling that you’re just crawling deeper into the earth. Where all the dead things are.”

“Lydia...”

“I heard your dad.”

Stiles can’t breathe.

“Before I Screamed, I could feel it all day, building. I knew it was going to happen, but I never know who it’s going to be.”

Her face is blotched red through her fixing powder, her orange eyelashes wet.

“He was _singing_. It was so _peaceful_.”

“Stop,” Stiles chokes, begs.

“I could see all these fireflies,” Lydia says, openly crying. “He was singing about a firefly. And now—”

She’s looking around the hall, as though she can still see them, her head tilting.

“What do you hear now?”

She looks directly at him.

“Wasps.”

—

He’s standing, hollow and bound to the earth, a vessel to the wind and the grain of soft, loamy dirt under his heels.

He’s in the semicircle of gravel and coarse sand that makes up the front of the cluster of Hale houses, right outside Deaton’s office. He’s confined neatly in a perfect circle, tongue tied and feet tangled with the roots of the land. He can smell where Roman is prepping the grill for their cook-out, the occasional waft of grease from Peter’s open garage. He hears the crackle of the fire pit, Malia and Derek throwing in pine cones and marveling at the writhing of sparks they can create. He imagines he breathes in time with the swelling of heat off the shingles of Peter’s house.

He feels a gust of wind, a dull tug in his gut, opens his eyes—

There’s a naked woman standing in front of him.

She’s covered in dirt, and when she grins at him, her eyes glow red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by [BonesOfBirdWings](http://archiveofourown.org/users/BonesOfBirdWings), my snister.


	5. Chapter 5

“Did you know whales had hoofs once?” Stiles asks, bouncing in his seat. “We learned it in class today.”

His dad smiles, says _That’s real neat, kiddo._

His dad’s not really eating the spaghetti. The noodles are overcooked, but Stiles thinks he’ll get it right next time.

“We learned that things change over time, but some things can change really really really fast, like the Hales. And they can change back. Isn’t that cool, Dad?”

_So cool._

“Dad...” Stiles starts, stops, begins again. He thinks about the clock in the living room, and how he’s watched his mom reset it every year. “If the Bite can heal people, why didn’t Mom become a werewolf?”

_Just twist the gear, like this_ , she would say.

_And Reset._

His dad keeps smiling but it looks different now, like a waxy sculpture left in the sun too long, like some of Stiles’ toys when he leaves them outside, their faces warped and frightening the next day.

_Some things change so slowly you don’t notice… and then you can’t change them back when you do._

“Oh...”

Reset.

Stiles pushes his sweating cup around on the table.

“Did you know room temperature water has a surface tension of 72 millinewtons per meter? Isn’t that cool?”

_So cool._

—

The woman’s name is Kali. When she speaks, her voice is more wolf than woman, her words weighted with the vibrato of the dangerous beast that lurks in the cavern of her mouth.

“I did not know the Hales had a new Emissary.”

She reaches for him, where he’s butterfly-pinned to the earth in Deaton’s circle. Her fingers stop just short of his ear, her dark claws pushing against a sparking, burning resistance. Stiles can feel the heat of it, of Deaton’s protection that keeps him in as much as others out. Her eyes are coals, radiating and hungry.

“Your heart is a caged bird,” she murmurs. “Flapping and frantic.”

“Kali,” Laura calls, almost a growl. “You were sent to scout ahead? I’ll take you to my mother.”

Derek is beside her, the firepit forgotten, body alert. Malia has darted into the house, and now that Stiles can concentrate, the whole Preserve has gone quiet and still, as though it dare not breathe in the presence of this predator. He shivers, frozen and silenced, and he feels the pressure in the air, on his ears and lungs. God, where is Deaton? He needs to get out of this circle or he might puke.

Kali drops her arm and pivots, and her skin ripples, sprouting razor sharp bristles before her hide settles again, bare and mud-streaked. Her shoulders roll with raised fur.

“Laura,” she rumbles. “You have grown vibrant these past years.”

Laura’s mouth is pressed thin.

“And your forest; it _breathes_. What have you Hales been feeding it?”

Peter appears out of the mouth of his garage. Stiles sees the way his face tenses when he spots Kali for the first time, how he half jogs to where Stiles is hunched, and places a black palm on him. He wipes the chill from Stiles’ back like water.

“Open your mouth, firefly,” he whispers, eyeing Kali guardedly.

The alpha turns to consider Stiles once more, something secretive and pleased in her wild features.

“He is yours, then? This trembling sparrow, your new witch?” she asks

“I chose him and he accepted.”

There seems to be something deliberate about Laura’s answer, like the words are important. There’s a ritual in her manner of phrase that Kali seems inclined to respect for the moment.

Stiles holds his breath, unsure what he could want, but Peter simply waits, something red glistening on his thumb, raised to Stiles’ chin. He can see Kali watching from the corner of his eye, blanches under her attention.

“Shame. You know we are recently one Emissary short.”

He opens his mouth.

Peter presses the pad of his thumb firmly to Stiles’ curling tongue, forces it into the soft cradle of the floor of his mouth, and holds. Stiles pants around the intrusion, flexes his tongue against the unwavering force Peter exerts, closes his lips around him. At the taste of blood, Stiles tries to jerk away, Peter’s nail catching on the inside of his lip.

His foot lifts from the ground. Falls outside the prison of the smoking circle. It’s difficult to swallow, his heart pounding. Peter’s eyes glow electric, and Stiles can still see the sheen of spit on his hovering thumb, the sharp edge of a claw just forming.

He finds his voice, trembling in the ashy shadow of Deaton’s broken spell, awash in the taste of Hale blood. His lip stings.

“Peter...”

It sounds like a groan, and Stiles bites down on his mouth, mortified. He’s hard.

“Why don’t you head inside? Pack politics are not nearly so interesting as it looks,” Peter says softly.  

Stiles jerks his chin into a nod, clenching the hem of his shirt in sweaty hands. It’s already been tugged into shapelessness. When he thinks his knees will hold steady, he picks his way across the gravel to Peter’s porch.

“Now then, let’s take you to Talia. I’m sure she has some entertainment lined up for Deucalion out in the trails,” Peter is saying, the march of bare feet on rock interrupting the murmur of the wind.

Stiles looks back.

Kali is baring her teeth, in something like a smile, he realizes belatedly. Her eyes track his form, flinty and marble-hard.

“I wouldn’t worry about that, Peter,” she laughs. It’s more bark coming from her throat. “Deucalion will find everything he needs right here, I think.”

Stiles slams the front door shut behind him.

—

In his room, Stiles dawdles between his laptop and homework, neither one stimulating nor distracting in the way he needs. Deaton has told him to find time in the day to meditate, calls it _independent study_ , even if it really is studying the back of his eyelids for the ten seconds he can stand to sit still.

He sits on his window sill, closes his eyes and bathes in the warm sun. Deaton has told him he should be able to find the song of the land if he focuses hard enough. In his circle spell, called _Alpha’s Reach_ , an artificial forging of purpose between earth and foot sole, Deaton says it imitates the link between Alpha and Emissary. The song is never more audible, the heavy thrum pulsing like a second heart behind his own, cloying and disrupting his circulation.

He tries to find that thready pulse on his own now, tries to seek his Alpha’s call.

Stiles taps his head against the sill. There will be a dent by Christmas.

It’s always quiet.

If he tries, he thinks he can hear talking outside, laughter, and the swelling memory of Kali’s snarl has him scampering from the window.

So much for focus and meditation.

He lays back on his bed, stretched and lazy, taps his chin with his fingers. Runs them over his mouth, his teeth. If he licks his lips, he can still taste blood. It hangs in his open mouth like a humid haze, coloring his breath with copper. He chews on his thumb nail, presses his tongue against the skin. Imagines he can smell engine oil.

_Firefly._

Stiles gasps, shudders.

He rolls onto his belly and tucks his face into his pillow, thumb pushing hard on his tongue and deep in his mouth.

He’s hard again, has tried to forget how earlier, the way Peter had—had—

His hips are making small pushing motions into his mattress. His face is burning with the trapped heat of his breath, and he reaches for his waistband with his other hand, for where he’s hot and dripping. It’s been so long, it feels like, _so long_ since he’s had this. He’s sensitive and slick in his hand, lazily thrusting into it with helpless _want._ He’s biting his thumb, swallowing around its shape. It’s not as wide or rough; Peter’s fingers are thicker and warm. He drags his nails lightly over his cock, imagines he can feel the tickle of claws.  

Stiles groans, humping into his hand.

He comes like that a few minutes later, curled on his side, legs trembling and tense, sucking his thumb and breathing heavily through his nose. He lays there, only hearing the sound of his own breath, sweat beading along his nose. He stays still, feels himself sliding from the crest of feeling so, _so_ good. He could meditate a thousand years in this state.

Stiles wipes his hand on his sweats, flips over so he can take a huge breath of fresh air.

He’s good; it’s good.

Stiles swallows thickly. Rubs his knuckles into his eyes where they’re feeling suddenly wet.

Everything’s fine.

It’s too hot and his pants are sticky, so Stiles wiggles out of them. There’s a monolithic crisis hovering in his periphery, eating up the soft spots in his skull and pawing for attention. Stiles rolls onto his side, bare legs tucked into his chest.

He looks at his desk, where he can see his new phone balancing on the edge, waiting to be activated. Laura had delivered it to him with his old SIM card and the promise that it should work okay.

Scott’s probably called like fifty times about his next date with Allison or their totally boring economics class or some other fabricated urgent thing that he needs to share.

Stiles sits up, reaches for the phone and the plastic baggy that holds his salvaged SIM card. The chip slides in without fanfare, and the screen lights up at the push of a button.

He lets it load and sync his data, install his preferences and pictures, flipping the phone over and over in his hands, learning it’s new shape and feeling the cool surface of it grow warm from his touch.

His phone buzzes with a new text, and Stiles glances at the preview, wonders what Scott has come up with now.

_From Dad: Did you know there are no—_

He drops the phone.

It bounces off the hardwood floor.

_Did you know there are no endemic earthworms in the U.S.?_

He covers his mouth with his hand, not sure if he’s going to throw up. It smells like spunk still.

His hands tremble as he reaches down to pick up his phone and look.

His inbox is empty.

Stiles takes a shaky breath and rubs his hands through his hair, ignoring the way his palms feel sticky. It’s his imagination, running off. He sends one text to his dad’s number and suddenly, he thinks he can channel the dead.

God, he can’t even feel the swell of power beneath his own feet when he’s standing over Hale land.

He needs a shower.

—

Stiles is still pink and damp when he creeps his way down stairs to take stock of the situation.

No one is in the house, Donnie’s keys tossed on the counter with Malia’s baseball cap. All the lights are off, the doors and windows open. He thinks for a moment he must be dreaming, because in the darkening twilight the house looks abandoned. Forgotten.

He hears voices from outside, and the spell shatters.

His clean feet are tender on the prickle of grass as he walks carefully across the backyard to Talia’s patio.

Their eyes are like lightning bugs in the dark, orange and blue and red, colonies of little flares. There are several newcomers among the Hales, and they are all nude and mud-smeared as Kali, their bodies free to glow in the crescent moon light. Talia’s wife, Roman, sings a strange howling song with a young man, their hands beating on the wooden floorboards of the deck, their mouths wide in a wolf’s grin.

“Stiles!” Malia calls, waving a sparkler. She’s shirtless as the rest, her cheeks smudged with a sort of ashy, deliberate marking. “The Alpha Pack brought fireworks!”

He feels himself flush, overwhelmed by their casual immodesty. It isn’t exactly uncommon in werewolf culture to embrace nakedness. He’s read it fosters unity and transparency between packs. Stiles clutches to his t-shirt self-consciously.

He looks around, but Peter isn’t anywhere to be found, though neither are Talia, Laura or Derek.

Donnie beckons him with an open hand, her skin shimmering with a faint silver glow.

“There’s the sparrow!” Kali barks, and several of the wolves laugh.

Donnie hands him a sparkler with a smile and a nod.

“Light it,” she says gently.

Stiles feels his stomach drop, looks around at the leers that follow him.

She doesn’t mean with a lighter.

“I can’t.”

Donnie hums, covers her hand in his. He tries not to think too hard on her impossibly tall, slender body, the way the light reflects off of her nudity.

“You know, there’s more than one way to feel your connection with the land. Deaton forgets it sometimes. There’s more than one road to Rome.”

Stiles doesn’t think that’s how the phrase goes, but he listens anyway.

“Not every flame requires single-minded focus. Some sparks prefer the _scatter_.”

Stiles feels a flare of heat where her fingers touch his and the sparkler ignites in a starburst of blue shards. She winks and picks up with Roman and the others, voice low and soothing.

Stiles swallows and thanks her, his voice choked.

He totters over to Malia and Cora, both of whom sport their shifted faces and dance to their mothers’ song with fistfulls of fire. He sits in the grass and watches, almost wishing for one of Deaton’s confinements. It keeps his edges neat and without fuss, protects him, he thinks as he watches the sparks rain from his hand, eating a path down the metal wire; protects him from consumption.

Cora lays in the grass beside him, stretches out the full length of her form, unabashed. He wonders if he smells like shame, in comparison.

His sparkler dies just as the patio door opens, and Talia, Deaton, and Laura step out. Peter and Derek are behind them, and watching them step into the light of the moon in nothing but skin dries his mouth and puts an itch in his bones. He stands, to get some distance, some air, to run back inside and shower again. He feels sticky already, palms slick with sweat. He clings to the burned sparkler, wire hot and still glowing orange. The singing has stopped.

“Stiles!” Laura calls. She’s happy to see him, waving him over wildly.   

He goes to his Alpha, chin tucked into his chest. He’s conspicuous in his clothes and in his wish to not be noticed. She armors him in the scoop of her arm, her ulna a shield.

“You are witnessing successful inter-pack negotiation. The fine print isn’t important for you right now; just know we never turn down a chance for barbecue and icecream.”

Laura chucks her knuckles under his chin, and runs the tip of her nose in the spot right above his ear. Stiles melts into it.

“We do so love our distractions.”

Stiles startles at the stranger’s voice, looks over Peter’s shoulder where a man stands against the doorframe. His eyes cast a scarlet pall on the patio, brighter than Stiles has seen anywhere before. He can feel the heat of it radiating on his face.

“Particularly,” the man drawls in an English accent, shouldering his way past Peter and Talia so that he can stalk towards where Stiles curls in the crook of Laura’s elbow. “When those distractions are tasty.”

He holds out a hand for Stiles to shake.

“You’re Deaton’s apprentice,” he says as Stiles cautiously extends his hand. The man catches his wrist and yanks until it’s right up under his nose. The red cast is abruptly extinguished as the man closes his eyes to savor a deep inhalation. Just when Stiles thinks it’s over, and he’ll get his arm back, a tongue, warm and oily slick, slides across his palm.

Stiles yanks his hand back, burning and horrified. The man hums, a growl deep in his chest, and Stiles can see how his hips flex in the air, wiry muscles knotted. He dares not look any lower.

“You are rather overdressed for the occasion. Will you not join the rest of us in bare flesh?”

A hand reaches to toy with Stiles’ loose shirt hem, and he jumps back against Laura, hits his head on her chin. He clutches at his shirt and shakes his head, voice lost.

The man and his pack laugh at his expense.

“Deucalion,” Kali purrs. “You’ll upset the Hale pack.” .

“The boy doesn’t mind a little teasing. Do you, my new friend?”

Stiles holds his breath, can’t make himself look at the Hales.

Everything’s fine. He’s okay.

“It’s fine.”

Deucalion grins.

—

It’s easy to forget about the strange guests living in the woods behind the house, the flash of their running figures a smear along a brightly lit horizon. They howl every night from the first flash of lightning bug to the last hoot of the owl.

Stiles doesn’t speak to the Alpha of Alphas, Deucalion, again.

“Tryouts for lacrosse start today dude,” Scott announces as he appears at Stiles’ car door that morning. Stiles jumps, fumbling his keys. “You're going, right?”

Malia hops down from the passenger seat of the Jeep with a salute and a jaunty “Later losers”, ball cap pulled low over her eyes, ponytail swinging. Her backpack weighs about as much as she does.

“I forgot. I didn’t even bring my equipment.”

“ _Dude_ ,” Scott complains. “You can borrow some from the locker room.”

Stiles slams his door shut and slings his back onto his shoulder.

“And contract some rare form of _necrotizing fasciitis_? Pass.”

“Cora’s going,” Scott wheedles, just short, it seems, of getting down on his knees. Stiles knows because it’s happened before; Scott has little shame. “You can’t leave me all alone to suck.”

Stiles rolls his eyes, but asks himself, what would be the point?

Very quietly, he asks, “Who would come watch me play?”

Scott looks like he’s swallowed his tongue.

“Like, the whole pack, duh!” Malia shouts from across the parking lot, sticking her middle finger up and disappearing into the school.

Stiles feels himself flush and Scott laughs.

“Remember last year? They took up a whole bleacher section, you know.”

In English class, Miss Blake has split the chalk board in two, _Good_ and _Evil_ written on each side.

“It’s a timeless theme,” she says, pacing slowly at the front of the classroom. ”This idea that good and evil are objective and are connected. That one cannot exist without the other. The Christian Bible addresses it at length. Yin and yang from the 4th century. Dostoevsky from the 19th… Captain America: Civil War.”

The class laughs a little.

“So why is it so necessary that we explore this one theme in literature over and over?”  

Danny raises his hand.

“Everything is relative. We wouldn’t know darkness without light or cold without heat.”

“You don't have to suffer before you can have an orgasm.”

The whole class titters. Miss Blake seems to almost roll her eyes, catches herself, and smiles instead.  

“Inappropriate Greenberg. But also true. The brain will experience a rush of reward chemicals under the right stimulation whether or not you’ve experienced pain or depression. Still, there is that inevitable crash, the regression to the mean. Is goodness, ecstasy, or power sustainable?”

No one answers her, and Stiles has to wonder what this has to do with _Macbeth_.

“Everywhere we look, we see this dichotomy where two different phenomena, seemingly in direct contradiction with each other, happen simultaneously, completely naturally. The universe gives birth to paradoxes all the time. Stiles.”

Stiles looks up, worried he's about to be called out for spending the last fifteen minutes drawing a giant tree.

“You’re studying to be an emissary,” Miss Blake says perfectly casually. “Surely you've seen these opposing forces in action.”

“Um.”

She smiles.

Stiles hears Lydia clear her throat. “I think it's a misnomer to assign non-sentient, amoral forces of nature a moral alignment. The force of gravity, the energy that flows beneath Beacon Hills— they aren’t _good or evil_. They just _are_.”

Miss Blake's grin grows

“Very good, Lydia.”

They spend the rest of class discussing whether Lady Macbeth is meant to be a source of evil or a force of nature merely acting on her given properties. At the sound of the bell, Stiles follows the shuffle of bodies on autopilot, pulls his bookbag on, leans into the sling of Scott’s arm.

“Stiles,” Miss Blake calls. “Mind hanging back for a sec?”

He looks back. She’s leaning against her desk, hands covered in the milky ash of chalk.

“Sure.”

Scott shoots at him with finger guns and heads out into the hall. The class seems much bigger without everyone in their seats. He’s never been this close to Miss Blake. He can see the clump of mascara caught on her eyelashes and the sardonic arch of her brow. She’s been veritably dubbed a Cool Teacher at Beacon Hills High, who doesn’t mind when students say _shit_ or _damn_ or eat snacks in class.

“I’m pretty new here, so I really have to keep my ear to the ground to learn what’s going on in town,” she says, tossing her hair back over her shoulder and folding her hands together. “I’ve been hearing your name a lot.”

Stiles shifts uncomfortably, refuses to meet her eyes.

“I am your teacher, but I’m also a resource for you. I have experience with grief, and I can help you if you need it.”

“...Thanks,” he says eventually.

Her hand presses lightly on his shoulder before whisking away again.

“And,” she says slowly, her tone gaining that particular flavor of caution that Stiles has begun to expect when interacting with anyone who knows his dad has died, “Alan Deaton isn’t known for being good at positive reinforcement.”

Stiles blinks in surprise. She smiles at him, tosses her hair again. She smells like frankincense.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Stiles is late for his next class.

—

Scott retells his first kiss with Allison every chance he gets.

It was nothing short of magical.

“We just looked at each other, and knew, you know? It’s time to kiss. Have you ever seen Allison’s eyes that close? They’re like thirty different colors. And her upper lip is so soft. I mean, so is her bottom lip, but man. Like soft dog ears. And her hair tickled my face, but in a good way. And then it started to rain, but we kept kissing, Stiles. A monsoon could have come down, and I would have just kept kissing her.”

“Like dog ears?” Stiles laughs, and Scott laughs too.

The Hales kiss often.

He’s seen the fond press of mouths between pack members; Malia kissing Donnie and Peter in the mornings before school, Derek kissing Cora as thanks for when she brings home pizza. It’s easy, listless affection, so freely bestowed, and he _envies_.

Stiles remembers his own first kiss, but not in the way Scott means.

He’s seven, and he’s in a bubble bath, driving a green, plastic boat up his dad’s arms. He’d had a beard then, before his days as the Beacon Hills Sheriff, and Stiles has a matching beard of suds clinging to his chin. They’re steam pinkened and tender, and in the small alcove of the tub, the absence of his mother, miles away in a hospital bed, isn’t so keen.

_Give Daddy a kiss,_ _Mieczyslaw_ _._

Their lips meet, soapy and sweet, and if Stiles could only ever have one kind of kiss for the rest of his life, it would be that one.

—

It’s been ten minutes, and Deaton is still ignoring him. It isn’t usually a problem; Deaton almost never speaks to him directly, a silent effigy of a human face. When he knocks on the office door and is admitted, it’s without words; only a silent expectation to stand still while he draws the circle around his feet.

Today, the circle doesn’t appear.

Deaton lets him in and sets to work as though he was never interrupted in the first place.

It’s been ten minutes, and Stiles hovers in uncertainty, a realm between free and enslaved... and still without right.

Deaton doesn’t want him to speak, so Stiles doesn’t question him.

The phone rings, and Deaton accepts an order for limestone.

Stiles stands in his corner.

—

Stiles knocks hesitantly on the closed door. It’s rare, for doors to be shut in the Hale houses. They don’t hide anything from a wolf’s ears, and in a lot of places, only breezy curtains and chiming beads hang in empty doorframes. Always open, always welcome.

The sitting room door swings open, and there’s Deucalion, his chest furred and sweat slick, his corded thighs on full display.

“Stiles,” he purrs in delight.

“Um,” Stiles stutters, looks down at his feet, and—huge mistake—looks back up, face burning. “Sorry? I, is Laura? Peter’s looking for an ignition coil.”

Deucalion considers him, laps up the sight of him, and Stiles isn’t stupid. He sees the want.

“Of course,” he whispers, like Stiles has shared a secret in the humid space between their faces, and opens the door the rest of the way.

Stiles darts past him where Laura is typing something furiously on her laptop and Derek is writing out some sort of complicated equation on a whiteboard and circling places on a Beacon Hills map; an abandoned silo warehouse, a fancy alternative medicine clinic, the school. There’s a blue dotted line marking the boundary of the Preserve and Hale property, and like a sun at the center of a blue orbit, a bright orange spot rests somewhere north in the woods. Stiles looks at it all curiously, trying to parse its meaning.

“Stiles!” Laura grins, gets up from the couch in the small sitting room and edges around the mess of maps and satellite images littering the floor and tabletops. She shuts the door on Deucalion, pushing him the rest of the way out of the room and severing the burn of his stare on Stiles’ face.

“Take a seat—if you can find one. I wanted to come find you anyway.”

“Peter’s looking for a coil,” he mutters again while carefully leaning against the arm of paper-stuffed chair.

Laura grimaces. “I may have traded our last one in town for a voltage regulator. Just between you and me.”

Stiles nods, glances at where Derek is now making small yellow circles in clusters within the Preserve.

“Stiles, I wanted to talk about something with you,” Laura says, leaning against the table in front of him so they’re eye to eye.

“Why are they all Alphas?” Stiles asks. “Deucalion’s pack, I mean.”

Laura seems taken aback, pauses for a second.

“Well. There’s no one way to form a pack. Sometimes there is no Alpha and sometimes there’s two,” she says, seeming to consider her next words. “The Alpha pack believes in only inducting what they deem as the best of the best, the strongest and most capable. For such a traditional definition of what it means to be an Alpha, it’s a pretty radical way to form a pack. There’s only the one in North America.”

Stiles chews on his lip.

“How does induction work? You can’t just make Alphas like you can betas.”

“Ah.” She looks at Derek who is still studiously scribbling numbers and marking. “There are a couple of ways to become Alpha, you know.”

“It’s inherited,” Stiles says, nodding.

“There are also rare instances of wolves becoming Alpha by sheer force of will— only in extreme and dire situations, mind. Deaton will probably teach you all about that at some point, but that isn’t how the Alpha pack works. There is another sure way.”

“Killing the Alpha.”

Laura looks solemn, uncomfortable. “Yeah.”

A fax machine in the corner of the room trills, begins to spit out page after page. Laura makes no move to keep it from fluttering to the floor and joining the mess it buries.

“Anyway,” she says, clears her throat. “Peter and I talked a bit about how you’re adjusting.”

Stiles feels something crawl up his skin and coil in his belly.

“You’re comfortable here?”

Stiles gives an affirmative.

“Great. We love having you. Your grades so far are good too, you champ.”

“It’s only been like, two weeks.”

Laura thumps him on the forehead with her palm. “Still. For all the visible ways stress can manifest, you’re doing a great job skipping it.” Very quietly, she continues, turning her palm for a soft caress where she’d cuffed him. “It does make me worry about all the invisible ways you’re stressing.”

Stiles stops breathing.

“We didn’t want to force anything on you when you first got here, but I think you should consider grief counseling.”

He can’t nod, just stares unblinkingly.

“We’ve got the resources to find someone for you. Someone who can help you sort through everything you’re having problems dealing with,” she’s saying, “someone who can appropriately help you with confusing thoughts and feelings.”

Stiles eyes dart from where he’d been drifting back to Laura’s gentle expression. Understanding and kind. He peeks warily at Derek, but he hasn’t in any way acknowledged he’s heard what Laura is saying. She can’t know. She can’t; he hasn’t _done_ anything—

“Think about it?” she asks, rising from her perch.

“Yeah,” he rasps.

When he gets back to the garage, that oil and heat comfort, back to Peter, Stiles is sullen and quiet. His bones feel weathered, the tide of his pulse grinding his own foundations to dust. He shrugs when Peter asks about the coil and sinks down onto the stool.

Peter turns to him, gaze unwavering, cups his cheek with a rough hand, so tender and careful.

“What’s on your mind, firefly?”

Stiles breathes deep, turns into Peter’s hand until just the very corner of his lips touches skin.

“Laura thinks I should try therapy…I don’t know.” He looks up at Peter, chin dipped. “What do you think?”

Fingers brush the soft skin behind his ear, spurs languid shivers through his body.

“It’s your choice, but… I would like it very much if you tried.”

Stiles swallows, heart pounding.

“Okay.”

He thinks of Cool Teacher, Miss Blake.

—

Deaton has a routine, one from which he rarely diverges. In the mornings, he walks the dew covered detritus of the forest, gathering tree bark and soil samples, checking on disturbances in his wards and refilling the bird feeders. Stiles has seen him, a brown shrike perched on his arm, small eyes black and hard.

During the days, Deaton spends his time at Talia’s side, meeting with pack and government delegates, helping other territories solve skirmishes and magical conundrums. Donnie has told him stories of Deaton facing demons and malicious spirits, darachs and omega rogues. How he’s spent the last three generations protecting the Hale pack from hunters and the powerful forces that make their territory a Beacon, tirelessly expanding his knowledge and abilities.

“His dedication is unmatched.”

He’s worked, not just to ensure the physical prosperity of the Hales, but the emotional, as well; the prosperity of the soul.

“And now, you’re pack too.”

Donnie kisses him on the temple and does the same to Malia before walking out for work.

It’s dichotomous, Stiles thinks, to the machine with whom he cohabits every afternoon following school. In his circle, he doesn’t feel prosperous, choked into the still nothingness his parents and teachers had spent half his life hoping for. He wonders if his dad can see that he can stand still now. The crawling, insatiable need to fidget, the itch of his body becoming brackish; it’s all meticulously smothered by Deaton’s firm, thorough care.

Maybe Donnie’s right, after all. Maybe Deaton understands more than Stiles can see, that his plan for him isn’t one commanded by his indifference and contempt. Maybe that’s how he plans to chip away at all the things that impede Stiles’ ability to be _worth_ something.

In the evenings, when Deaton has released Stiles from his bonds and is placing his tools and papers back into their assigned spots, neat and micromanaged just shy of violently, Stiles steps out into the open air raw and sensitive. It takes him a few hours to find his voice again, to remember it is his to use. Malia always complains that he’s mopey when he comes out of Deaton’s office.

“Jeez, does Deaton torture you or something?”

It prompts Peter to glance up from his finance worksheets and cup the back of Stiles’s head.

“You okay, son?”

Stiles swallows, something warm rising in his belly.

“Fine.”

Deaton never stays for dinner. When it’s dark, he locks up and drives away, rarely spending the night in his private house.

Stiles fetches his earbuds from the jeep, and watches as Deaton’s tail lights disappear through the black bars of the trees.

The yard is empty. Most of the adults are gone, trekking the Preserve with the Alpha pack. He thinks they’re looking for something, but Laura has been careful to keep him uninvolved. Cora and Roman are still in town working. Only Malia remains, watching Netflix in her room and trying to pick a good color to dye her hair. Stiles had suggested purple.

He glances at the darkened doorstep of Deaton’s office.

He’s picked locks before, learned when he was eleven on his dad’s set of handcuffs.

There were mornings when the Sheriff would find him asleep, cuffed to the coffee table or shower faucet, broken bobby pins littered under him. He’d wake Stiles up, fish out his keys with a sort of resigned huff. Put Stiles on his hip and carry him to the bathroom, groggy and sleep supple, bruised at the wrists. He remembers the gentle rub of aloe lotion on the abraded skin, remembers watching his dad’s broad thumb kneading on his small wrist bone where it was purple and tender.

_You’ve got to be more careful, baby._

Deaton doesn’t have any security system that Stiles can see. And why should he need it on werewolf property, where thieves can be heard and scented?

He’s in the office in less than a minute.

Stiles carefully shuts the door behind him and locks it. The office is different inked with shadows, looks smaller and less imposing. Or maybe it’s because Deaton isn’t here.

He doesn’t know why he’s here or what he thinks he’s looking for.

He creeps around the counter, staying clear of the windows. He peeks into the filing cabinet first. It’s an index of invoices and special orders, documents organized by pack or affiliation. The cabinets reveal the equipment Deaton uses to prepare ingredients, a gram scale, an electric grinder; jars of unrecognizable and strange contents, some of them plant in origin and some animal. In the drawers lining the cabinet surfaces, Stiles finds knives and wooden spoons, stained with use. There’s a closet, padlocked and secure, so Stiles moves on.

He considers going into the rest of the building proper, where Deaton’s private rooms are, but he decides he doesn’t know what sort of defensive measures Deaton may have. He could have a security camera.

The true subject of his desire, of all his coveting, comes in the form of Deaton’s glass bookshelf.

For the first time, he can really peruse his selection, read their spines. Some of them are in different languages, Latin and Spanish, or in some script he’s never seen before. The glass door creaks as he eases it open, careful not to leave fingerprint smudges. There are so many.

_Chemical Ecology for Craftsmen_

_North America and Ethnobotany_

_Ethical Necromancy_

They’re all thick and old looking, and Stiles doesn’t want to take anything too noticeable. Deaton would see the empty slot on the shelf and know immediately who had taken it. There’s a small book, thin and short with a hardcover, wedged between _GSI and You_ and _Soil Phosphate Analysis: Tracking Spells_.

_Southern California Geomarkervisibility_.

He slides it from it’s space, flips through the pages. It’s lots of maps, several on Beacon Hills, and small text. Stiles isn’t very impressed, but he supposes it will work for a first look. He slips the cover off the book, slides it back onto the shelf. You can’t tell from a standing position that the cover is hollow. Stiles will have it back where it belongs in a day. No way will Deaton notice.

He slips back out, locks the knob before closing the door behind him. He considers hiding the book in his pants, but that would just be weird. No one is going to think it’s weird for him to have an unmarked book in hand. It could be homework, could be from the library.

“Hello, Stiles.”

Stiles jumps, heart in his mouth as he whips around.

Deucalion leans against the side paneling of Deaton’s office, arms crossed over his naked chest. Stiles has almost gotten used to his nudity.

“I left my book in there,” he says through a numb mouth.

Deucalion hums, stalks towards him, twigs and rocks chiming sharply under his bare feet.

“I could investigate that lie. How important is it to you that I don’t?”

Stiles shifts in place, clutches the book to his chest. He’s breathing fast, looking around for someone and hoping there’s no one at the same time.

“I’m willing to offer you a chance to buy my silence.”

“No way,” Stiles chokes, taking a clumsy step back.

Deucalion smiles, his red eyes almost too bright. In the dark, Stiles is less shy about looking, can see where Deucalion is hard and big, and he looks like he knows Stiles is looking. He licks his top lip nervously.  

“What… what do you want?”

“A little kiss,” Deucalion says, and Stiles clenches his eyes closed, stomach rolling. “Harmless, really.”

“Just a kiss, ” Stiles whispers, voice small. A kiss; it’s normal between werewolves, it means nothing. It’s fine. He looks up. “Fine.”

Deucalion’s red eyes are slitted, a cat’s pleased expression. He advances until they’r chest to chest, and Stiles hurries to put his hands up and stop him from getting any closer.

“Just a kiss!” he repeats, flustered and hot.

“I’m an honorable man,” Deucalion says, and Stiles can feel the bass vibration of an Alpha’s voice in the air between them. He doesn’t believe him, not at all. Even Deucalion doesn’t seem to believe himself.

“Okay,” Stiles croaks. “Okay.”

He goes up on his toes, pulls Deucalion down by the neck. Presses his wet mouth to Deucalion’s, and there’s a slick slide of lips before he’s pulling away, nearly falling in his haste. He covers his mouth with his hand and peeks up at Deucalion.

His lips are shiny, his arousal jutting from between his tense thighs.

“Such a sweet boy,” he purrs.

It’s fine.


	6. Chapter 6

Stiles’ hands are like his mother’s. He feels the phantom shape of them mirrored in the press of his own palms, too big for their arms; and in the divots of his knuckles where the skin is translucent thin and ticklish. A cool memory that pinkens his nail-beds. He’s compensated her silence with the life in his over-eager gestures, their own language of sign, just for them, from son to his maker.

Lately, he hasn’t felt much like hand-talking.

When his dad was particularly emotional, poignantly affectionate, he’d squeeze Stiles’ hands in his own and rest his cheek on his head. Squeeze his fingers to hurt and say

_She’s here._

For a while, Stiles thinks Peter’s hands are rough. He imagines them career-toughened, like his father’s. He imagines the feel of his dry, worked fingers on the soft insides of his arms and knees, the mingling sensations of claw and callous pricking him in vulnerable places.

But Peter’s hands are _soft_.

They keep a bottle of milk and honey lotion in the bathroom, the scent a barely-there wisp of gentle forgiveness. It soothes where Peter should be rubbed raw after working for days on cogs and engine parts. His hand barely rasps on it’s way down Stiles’ cheek at _good nights_ , and is perfectly soft by morning. The toiling marks of habit reversed in the ease of a healing power that wolves like Peter take for granted; weathered grooves erased.

Peter’s palm hesitates where it lingers in the cloud of Stiles’ breath, his face obscured by the woolly murkiness of sleep.

“What’s wrong?”

Concern spools in the lines in Peter’s face, and he looks so much younger suddenly. He remembers that werewolves age differently.

Stiles opens his mouth, untangles his tongue from cobwebs.

“Nothing,” he says.

They respect his privacy rather than chase tail over the sound of a white lie.

—

He can still taste Deucalion on his mouth when he reaches his room.

He gasps, blood rushing as he leaps up the narrow, rickety stairs to the attic, the light sound of laughter clinging to his tripping feet. He hurls the book, at nothing or everything, just _away_. It smashes into the wall, scuffs the paint. He instantly feels guilty, afraid. That he’s damaged Peter’s house, or worse, the book, where Deaton will one day notice.

Stupid, he is so _stupid_.

It’s just a kiss. Like it’s nothing.

His stomach rolls and his mouth _burns_ , but it was just a kiss.

He picks up the book and flattens its bent pages. Pulls his pillow over his face.

—

“So your dad left the house to Melissa McCall in case you were underage when… Anyway, it’s been left to her,” Laura says.

They’re in a field of knee-high grass, the blades so sharp, they could cut. But they bend away from him and his Alpha, feather soft.

“Cool.”

Laura likes this spot in the Preserve. There’s a burrow of mice she can hear just under the grass roots, and she describes their heartbeats and sniffing like the patter of rain.

“She can’t afford the mortgage, so my mom offered to buy it for her. That way it’s still yours.”

Stiles breathes evenly.

“I’m not using it. It’s not like there’s anything—”

He stops, rubs his knuckles in between his eyebrows. There isn’t anything.

But.

“It’d be mine?”

“All yours.”

Stiles feels something unwind in his gut. All their furniture is still at the house. All the marks of a soul. Traces of their lives in the dents and scars of a home well-broken in.

“I’ve always wanted my own place, to throw parties you know,” he smiles.

Laura rolls her eyes.

“Maybe we’ll have mom rent it out instead. An older couple with like like five dogs.”

“Just like me,” Stiles grins.

Laura cuffs him. She chases him in a circle, the grass whipping at his arms. They sting, but he doesn’t bleed.

Later, when they’re lying on their backs, the grass a swaying cocoon, Stiles looks at the blazing sun overhead and thinks of the yellow circles he’d seen on the map of the preserve. He sees it hanging every time he passes Talia’s office, sees the Alpha pack circling and circling. Vultures, waiting for something to die maybe.  

“What are you guys looking for out here?”

Laura twiddles a stem in her fingers until it’s a green pulp.

“Don’t worry about it, Stiles.”

—

Deaton comes back.

He doesn’t notice the book missing, leaves Stiles alone in his corner until he’s finished sorting dirt or whatever. Sometimes Stiles doesn’t notice he’s finished until he opens the door and tells Stiles to leave. He wonders if Deaton’s put a spell on him; that he can’t remember the last few hours. That he feels severed from his body.

“What are you guys looking for in the Preserve?” he asks as Deaton meticulously washes his hands.

“If Alpha Talia has not told you, it is none of your concern.”

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Maybe she hasn’t told me because I haven’t asked her yet.”

Deaton smiles that empty, disconcerting smile.

“You are welcome to ask her.”

“It has to do with the Alpha pack, right?”

Now Deaton looks irritated. He drags a stool to the table.

“Have a seat, Stiles.”

Stiles swallows, but doesn’t move. He feels safe right here in his inert circle, thanks.

“ _Sit_ , Stiles.”

Stiles sits. He raps his hands on the countertop until Deaton swats his knuckles with a glass stirring rod.

“Listen carefully, Stiles. There are many intricacies to inter-pack relations, and the Alpha pack is a volatile force. They have a history with Talia, much of which you cannot understand and are too impatient to learn. Be respectful and stay out of their way. There is little need for children disrupting diplomacy.”

Stiles shifts uncomfortably.

“They seem interested in _me_ , though.”

Deaton leans back, considering.

“Yes,” he drawls. “Deucalion has particular tastes. Be sure not to offend him.”

Stiles balks, feels his stomach drop out.

“You’re saying I can’t, can’t.”

His tongue sticks to his teeth. Deaton waits him out, impassive.

“I can’t say no. To him.”

Deaton tsks.

“You can,” he says, tapping his fingers slowly on the countertop. “But I’d advise you to weigh your options carefully.”

Stiles, somehow, feels even worse than before.

“There can be benefits. Alphas are very powerful, and certain acts have magic.”

“Sex,” Stiles says blandly, heart racing. “Sex is magic.”

Deaton smiles, something cold and terrible.

“Virginity, actually.”

Stiles folds into himself, shame and heat warring in equal measure.

“Virginity has a tendency to interfere with certain magics. Getting rid of it might be in your best interest.”

Stiles… is speechless.

“You’re embarrassed. You needn’t be. As your mentor, I’ll come to know all your shame and weaknesses.”

Deaton takes pity on him after that and exiles him to his corner. He stands there forgotten and grateful for it until Deaton considers him humiliated enough. Stiles books it out of there as soon as he’s permitted.

Leaving Deaton’s office is like stepping onto another world. He’s still running when he bursts into the house to find Donnie helping Malia shave one side of her head.

“You next, Stiles?” Donnie asks with a laugh..

“No, thanks,” he half shouts, running past.

“I wanna tattoo like Derek’s,” Malia is saying over the buzz of clippers.

“Sure,” her mom says. “On your Rite when you’re seventeen, like everyone else.”

Malia protests loudly.

“Cora got hers done already, but Aunt Talia doesn’t know. She got some pothead, unregistered Druid to do it when she went to LA for that Twenty-one Pilots concert. It’s supposed to be a hawk, but it looks more like a chicken nugget.”

Their voices dissipate to an indistinct murmur by the time he gets to the landing.

He thinks about doing homework or calling Scott, but his eyes catch the corner of a thin book sticking out from under his pillow.

Stiles can’t resist his curiosity after a few minutes, and gingerly retrieves it. There’s a crease on the first few pages from its fall the night before, but it lays flat.

He flips it open.

The text is small and cramped, slightly uneven as it wobbles across the pages, like a typewriter out of alignment. He skims, because he wants to know more but he isn’t that interested in California geography. He took a whole class on it freshman year, and it didn’t leave much of an impression.

There’s only five chapters, one about sea levels and another on telluric currents. He spends a long time on the pictures, of rolling hills and watershed diagrams. Hand drawn images of complex root systems carved into the yellow paper with the force of a heavy pen. There are ink smears pooled in the crease of the book, and some of the pictures have bled so badly on the pages after, Stiles can’t read any of the entries. The back cover is a map of southern California, filled with dotted lines and symbols. He looks for a key, but there isn’t one.

Stiles thumbs over where Beacon Hills is typed, a large icon of a tree inscribed under the name. Its roots branch out in a complicated pattern all over the county.

All in all, it’s barely sixty pages.

He sighs and wishes he’d gotten a better book for the price he’d paid.

—

Stiles is eleven, and his mother has been dead for three months.

At the beginning, when mom just forgets things, like when he needs to be picked up from school or how many pills of Adderall he takes everyday, it’s not a big deal. His dad promises him that mom is just sick, and it won’t change anything. He’ll still go to school and play with friends, still watch movies and and read bedtime stories. They’ll go to the Beacon Hills Neurological Center every Wednesday, but it’s just a detour. Dad says _It’s just temporary_ , and even more perplexing, that his mom will still love him very, very much, even if she isn’t here to do it.

They’d get by. They’d figure it out.

He dad is telling the truth, in a way. Everything is temporary, but nothing is the same at all.

He creeps down the stairs to the kitchen. The lights are on, the sun is in the windows, but there’s nothing warm in the room. He wants to crawl back through his dust tracks to the safety of a bedroom that smells like the three of them. When they’d spend all day in bed, Stiles filling the shape where his mom and dad don’t touch. Where the summer heat felt like melting and his mom still knew his name.

The kitchen countertops are covered in fast food bags and the dining table is stacked with empty glass bottles. It isn’t the mess or even the smell.

His dad is slumped to the side in a stiff wooden chair, his white undershirt soaked with a tipped over beer bottle.

“Daddy?” he whispers.

It’s that Stiles is eleven, his mother is dead, the pantry is four days empty, and he’s hungry.  

He steps over the stuff littered in the floor, sharp edges and cold, and grabs his dad’s arm. He shakes it roughly.

“ _Dad_. I’m hungry, let’s go to the store. I want icecream.”

His dad groans, shifts. The beer bottle thunks loudly on the hardwood, leaves a shallow gauge where it hits.

His dad’s eyes creek open, two rusted doors, red and swollen.

_Hey, baby_.

He rasps it like it’s a secret, and Stiles knows he isn’t the one his dad is seeing. He gets confused when he’s tired like this, and reach for his cheek.

Stiles shakes his arm some more.

“It’s lunch time, Dad. _Dad_.”

_Stiles. Oh_ , the exhalation and disappointment, the realization. It’s bleary, and his head lolls back on the chair. There’s something clumped in the growing beard on his chin.

_Oh_.

Stiles shifts from foot to foot.

“I’m hungry,” Stiles repeats in a small voice, guilty he’s not who his dad wants him to be.

_Aw, jeez kid._

His dad wipes a hand down his weathered face. He doesn’t move for a long time after. Stiles sometimes thinks his dad might be turning into stone, he’s so still now.

“ _Daaad_.”

His dad throws a hand in the direction of the barren fridge and knocks another bottle over.

Stiles wrinkles his nose.

“But I want _icecream_.”

His dad groans long and loud, pulls at his hair. He’s started doing this thing where he doesn’t look up or respond, like Stiles will disappear until he’s wanted again. Until it’s dark, and dad’s not so absentminded and his back can’t take sleeping at the table another night. He’ll wake up to his dad’s teary face pressed to his chest, and he’ll talk to Stiles then, with _I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry_. Stiles feels like the center of the universe like that.

“Dad!”

A fist slams into the tabletop. Glass rattles. It reminds Stiles of loose baby teeth, whistling.

Stiles steps back, swallows. His dad sits up, reaches behind him and slaps his wallet on the table.

Stiles snatches the wallet and goes. He tells himself it isn’t really him that his dad is yelling at, yelling _I can’t do this alone, I can’t_.

He slams the front door behind him and stomps down the driveway. He thinks about dragging a rock down the side of his dad’s cruiser. Stabbing his pocket knife into a tire. Breaking the livingroom window. He walks to the bus stop three streets over instead, hands shoved in his pockets and wondering what it will take to make his dad wake up.

He’s never used the bus alone before. There’s a coin slot that comes up to his chest when he steps on, and he feeds it three quarters. When he asks, the driver tells him it’s a twenty minute ride to the shopping center. He takes a seat between two elderly people and opens his dad’s wallet.

There’s a credit card. A worn picture of Stiles’ grandparents he’s never met. A creased fortune from the Chinese place by the police station.

The store is cold inside, the ceiling taller than he remembers. He walks the wide, towering aisles in the grocery store in circles, chewing the strings of his pullover, and getting lost between the canned soups and the seasoning packets. He buys strawberry ice cream and three boxes of tictacs.

When the cashier asks him where his mom is, he says dead.

There’s a park across the street, and Stiles sits on a bench facing the duck pond. He eats his ice cream and watches the people walking their dogs or babies around, playing with soccer balls or lacrosse sticks. Sees his mom a dozen times in the passersby. He pretends some of the families are his, likes the look of one particular couple and their two kids, or maybe an elderly woman walking alone in need of the company of a child, or perhaps the two young men lying on a picnic blanket.

He waits for his dad to come find him. Worried, angry.

The rest of his ice cream melts into a pink soup by the time the sun has gone low into the tree line. The park is emptier now. His face feels itchy and sunburnt, his stomach hurts from all the sweets, and it’s getting dark.

He rides the bus home, hands sticky and cold.

He wakes up to creaking steps in his room and anticipates his dad’s heavy apologies.

It’s Donnie, with a stack of laundry and an invitation to breakfast.

—

At school, Stiles finds Miss Blake in the hallway after lacrosse practice. She’s walking absently from the first floor teacher’s lounge, flipping through a stack of papers with a frown. Stiles guesses the Macbeth essays aren’t looking so good.

“Miss Blake?” he calls, slinging his duffel bag on his shoulder. Scott and Cora wait behind him, ready to walk to the parking lot together. Stiles waves them on.

Miss Blake looks up and smiles when she sees him. She really is super gorgeous.

“Stiles, hey. You’re here late.”

“Yeah, I….” He hadn’t planned on finding her today. “Can I talk to you?”

“Sure,” she says, smiling wider. “I can give you back your essay too. It was good, even though I’m not convinced the Mongolian invasion of Kievan Rus has much to do with Shakespeare.”

Cora and Scott reluctantly head to parkinglot to wait for him, and Stiles walks with Miss Blake to her classroom. She leaves the lights off when they sit at her desk, and casually flips through the stack to find the one belonging to Stiles. Stiles works himself up to defend his paper topic when she hands it back to him. His words stick when he sees the blue _A_ in the top corner.

“Um.”

“This isn’t a pity A, Stiles,” Miss Blake says, perching on her desk, ankles crossed. “It’s well-written. It proves you’re capable of analysis. I even learned something about the Golden Horde. And,” she pierces him with a _look_ , “I know that the next assignment you hand me will answer the original question in some way. Right?”

Stiles nods quickly. “Yeah, yes. I totally agree.”

She laughs.

“Good. Now, what did you want to talk about?”

Stiles takes a deep breath.

“Well, before. You offered to, you know.” Stiles stops, frustrated with himself. “I guess I wanted to talk to you about some stuff. That’s bothering me.”

Miss Blake makes a _go on_ gesture.

“Um, you were right the other day. I’m training to be the new Hale Emissary. I’m not sure where you’re from, but in small towns, that sort of thing isn’t a secret. Laura— the heir, she’s been courting me since I was like _born_. It was practically announced in the paper when she asked my mom.”

“You’re a Spark,” Miss Blake says with a nod. “Makes sense, Druids are in high demand everywhere.”

“Yeah. Um.” Stiles shrugs his shoulders and props his chin on his hand. “The problem is, I can’t do anything with it. They keep saying all this stuff about the connection with the _land_ , and hearing its call. But I never feel it, and when—”

Stiles chokes a little. He continues at a whisper.

“Being a Spark is about willing it, _wanting_ it. But the one time I needed it to help me, nothing happened.”

Miss Blake doesn’t ask for him to clarify. She leans forward and squeezes his shoulder.

“And my _mentor_! He hates me. I suck, and he wants to blame everything about me for it. It’s my ADHD. My impatience. My _virginity_ ,” he sneers. “I don’t get how _he’s_ the Hale Emissary. You were right, he’s the worst.”

Her lips quirk.

“I don’t think those were my exact words. But even outside his circle, Deaton has a bit of a reputation. He’s been a practicing Druid for a very long time.”

“I’m sure he’s been an asshole for even longer,” Stiles mutters.

“I don’t have an opinion on that,” she says diplomatically, but she’s grinning.

“Anyway, I’m stuck with him. At least until Laura thinks I’m trained enough.”

“You haven’t done an induction ritual, even?”

She sounds surprised.

Stiles looks up in suspicion. “How much do you know about being an Emissary?”

Miss Blake actually appears to blush. “I wanted to be a witch when I was very young. I thought I knew everything. If only I could have the confidence of a thirteen year-old again.” She laughs. “It didn’t work out, though.”

Stiles smiles tentatively.

“Yeah. I was breaking into the police station evidence room by then. I think it’s a peak year. Everything’s downhill after that.”

Miss Blake laughs again. It's infectious.

He’d been trying to solve the disappearance of Scott’s fish over their weeklong stay at summer camp. The evidence room hadn’t helped him solve the case, but his dad had explained to him out of exasperation that a fish that “runs away from home” is “a euphemism.”

“But maybe it isn’t you that’s the problem,” Miss Blake says. “Beacon Hills is old, and the Hale claim on the land is almost as old. That’s a lot of magic flying around. Maybe there’s something interfering with your ability to connect.”

Stiles feels his heart pick up.

“Like what?”

She shakes her head.

“I’m not sure. It’d have to be something powerful. More powerful than an Alpha’s claim on you, and that’s a hard thing to beat.”

It isn’t a solution, but Stiles leaves Miss Blake’s classroom feeling better somehow.

Cora curls her nose when he gets outside and makes his way to where she and Scott are loitering by his jeep.

“She always smells like candles. I can’t wait for Miss Ramsey to come back.”

Stiles shrugs about to throw his gear in his car but hesitates when he sees Allison half-hidden behind Scott. She waves sheepishly. They’ve been mutually avoiding each other since dinner at her house.

“Heeey,” she drawls, awkward.

He darts a look at Cora, but she’s glancing down at her phone, pretending to be busy.

“Um. Hey,” Stiles scratches his head. “You joining us for shakes?”

“If that’s cool! I thought Scott mentioned I was gonna be hanging around today,” she says, her elbow jabbing Scott who looks as unapologetic as a person can be. He grins at them both, opens the jeep door for Allison. Cora shoves them both out of the way and takes the front seat with a smug smirk.

“So listen,” Allison says quietly as Cora and Scott are ordering their milkshakes. Her hand reaches across the table and grabs his so fast Stiles thinks maybe she hadn’t meant to. “I’m sorry about my parents. They can be. _Intense_.”

“Yeah,” he croaks, clearing his throat.

Her dimples show as she swirls her straw in her cup. She really is really pretty, her expression earnest and strong. “They really do want to look after you, even if it doesn’t seem like it. Trust me, I’ve spent my whole life decrypting their parenting style.”

“I’m not their responsibility,” Stiles mutters. _I belong to the Hales_ , he isn’t saying.

Allison shakes her head. “You are though, in the same way you’re the Hale’s responsibility. Or even the local police. It’s their job to protect the people of Beacon Hills.”

She squeezes his hand and withdraws.

“I know she came on strong, but mom just wants to make sure you have all the info.”

Stiles concedes without really meaning it. He sees Cora rolling her eyes as she comes back to their booth, making a gagging motion.

“Oh, and um...” Allison actually looks a little guilty. “Mom says you’re invited to lunch this Sunday if you want to come. She’s hosting a neighborhood barbecue.”

“Cool, does it come with a side serving of anti-shapeshifter propaganda?” Cora asks, plopping down at the table and throwing her arm around the back of Stiles’ chair.

Allison sighs, clearly disappointed. “Not everything is a political move, Cora.”

Stiles starts furiously slurping on his Snickers shake to avoid having to talk. If he ignores it, maybe the conversation will go away.

“So there _won’t_ be any local public officials at your mom’s little party. No important secretaries from town hall? Not even the little old librarian?” Cora presses.

Allison looks away.

Scott finally gets to table, hands full of napkins and a leaky milkshake. He takes a look at their faces and groans.

“ _Guys_. We agreed to leave all parent talk outside the diner. You broke the one rule.”

“Sorry,” Allison says miserably.

Scott shakes his head, arms crossed.

“Stiles gets custody of all our shakes. Hand them over.”

“Dude,” Cora whines.

“It’s the rules,” Scott insists.

Stiles takes them gladly and takes a huge, obnoxious mouthful of each before handing them back.

“It’s the rules,” Stiles repeats with a shrug and a smile. He’s got brain freeze, but it tastes all right.

—

Talia thinks going to Victoria’s lunch is a great idea.

They’re all on the porch, eating cold slices of pineapple and being generally miserable in the heat.

“It’d be good for you to go, Stiles. Why don’t you go too, Laura? I’m sure the Argents won’t mind,” she says.

Laura grimaces. “You’re trying to start shit. When _I’m_ Alpha….”

She trails off under her breath, chasing a trail of fruit juice down her arm.

“Would you like to make plans with the Argents for Stiles’ weeknights, too?” Peter asks Talia, bitingly. “While you’re signing him up.”

“Maybe I will,” she snaps back.

There’s a general upsurge of voices going around.

Stiles sighs, looks down at his sticky hands. His mouth burns from the citrus.

“Um, it’s okay,” he says over them all, “I don’t have to go. It’s not a big deal. Mrs. Argent probably has like three other sad orphans on the sidelines just in case.”

Laura bites her lips, trying not to smile while Talia looks vaguely disapproving.

“Yeah mom, it’d be rude if Stiles hogged the tragic backstory card from all the other kids in town.”

“Cora!” Talia scolds, but deflates when Stiles can’t help laughing.

“Suffering isn’t a competition,” Stiles tells Cora sagely, and they all look at him with wide, searching looks. He grins. “Because if it were, I’d win. _Everyone_ loved my dad.”

—

Everyone.

—

He goes to the barbecue.

The smell hits him as soon as he gets out of the car, and he’s seeing his dad out back, hands greased with hamburger and eyes red from the smoking grill. It’s the smell of his dad’s shirt and shoulders in the summer, meat and sweat and Stiles would _complain_ , tell him he was stinking the whole house. The gritty smear of his fingers grabbing his neck. A breezy chuckle tickling his face.

_Shut up and eat, kiddo._

“Stiles!” Allison shouts from the side of her house.

She’s climbed the privacy fence and is waving him over, shoulders glowing pink under the sun. A second later Scott pops up on the fence, hair wet and nose sunburnt.

“Dude, they have a water slide attached to their pool!”

Stiles waves back, throws his towel over his shoulder. His t-shirt sticks to his back where Peter had rubbed him with sunscreen until every inch of him was shining.

“Delicate human,” Peter huffs.

Malia had sneezed from the smell.

Allison unlatches the gate for him and pulls him to the grill for a burger. Mr. Argent gives him a sort of tense, grimacing smile that pulls at his mouth like a cramp, and doesn’t speak as he slides a patty onto a plate and passes it over. He’s wearing a yellow polo, dotted with tiny green lobsters, and crocs that are creating a disconcerting cognitive dissonance with every other encounter Stiles has had with the man.

He looks around the backyard, perfectly manicured and green, an antithesis to the Hale territory that grows wild and untamed. There are no sprawling grasses or curling underbrush, no small creatures peeking out from the trees.

The yard is full of Mrs. Argent’s guests, clustered together and basking by the poolside. They’re all neatly manicured too. Stiles figures himself the most wild among them.

Mrs. Argent finds him by the coolers, a trail of smiling adults padding after her like ducklings, drinks in hand.

“Stiles, thank you for coming,” she says, her hand finding his shoulder. It’s warm, like everything else, and Stiles realizes he had expected her to be cold. “I’d love to introduce you to some of my friends.”

“Mom,” Allison says tightly, her smile wide and fake, “Don’t you think we should let him enjoy lunch first?”

Mrs. Argent releases him and nods. “Of course. Make yourself comfortable, Stiles.”

“Like a vulture,” Allison mutters as Mrs. Argent’s group drifts away.

“Is that okay?” Stiles asks her.

“It’s fine. I’m the next matriarch so I’m supposed to show _initiative_ ,” she says, rolling her eyes. “The Hunter Society thinks it’s cute. They eat this power play stuff _right_ up.”

Stiles wonders how the Argents might feel if they realized how similar they are to the Hales. How might things be different if Laura and Allison compared leadership notes.

Allison’s warm hand slips into his and guides him to where Scott has since moved to sit among a loose circle of kids from the lacrosse team and Allison’s other friends. They wade in the pool and along the poolside in a cluster of perfect summer posture. Lydia Martin edges away from him on her reclined pool chair, the sun a sharp glare off her sunglasses.

They’re talking about Homecoming.

“Mom hates school functions,” Allison says. “That’s half the reason I’m so set on going.”

She catches Scott’s eye, and they smile sweetly at one another.

“The other half is I get to go to the dance with you, Scott.”

Everyone makes appropriate teasing and gagging noises, none of which extinguish their radiance.   

Stiles eats his burger. He’s spent so much of his life desperate to blurt every word he can think of, but lately it’s like he’s run dry.

Too much time with Deaton, maybe.

“Nice for you. Coach is basically killing us at practice,” Jackson complains. “If I have to watch Greenberg puke one more time—”

Danny splashes Jackson in the face with a laugh.

“It’ll be worth it when you win the Homecoming game,” Lydia says smartly. “I’m not toting a loser around on my arm.”

“Can’t you predict who’s going to win?” Matt Daehler asks, peering at Lydia over his sunglasses.

Lydia inclines her head, lip curled.

“Dude,” Danny says, shaking his head.

“Not unless someone drops dead on the field,” Lydia grits.

Stiles looks steadfastly at the water, a bead of sweat running behind his ear.

“You never know,” Matt sneers. “I mean, with everything going on, would it be a surprise? This is what happens when there are too many Unnaturals in one town.”

Everyone starts at the slur.

“Dude!” Scott yelps.

“Shut up, Matt. You’re jilted because Cora Hale said no when you asked her to the dance,” Lydia snapped.

Matt’s face turns bright red. He clams up quickly after that.

Gwen, another lacrosse player, openly laughs at him. “Besides, she’s going with the new girl, Kira from AP Chem class. Cora is hella gay, you idiot. I wish I had asked her out before Kira.”

It starts another conversation about who’s going with whom, and Stiles gets up to get away, find a napkin or something, before he pushes Matt into the pool and drowns him. He thinks maybe, if he got mad enough he could feel the flow of water without touching it, could squeeze Matt with it until he popped. Maybe.

He doesn’t think this is what the Hales meant when they preached about feeling connected to the land.

There are more people in the yard now, some dressed like they’ve come straight from the office, some in swim suits. God, is that the Mayor?

Stiles edges around, face down so no one recognizes him. He tries to imagine a perfect circle traveling with him under his feet, a barrier as good as a prison. He sees the drink table and reaches for a solo cup the same time as someone else.

He looks up and sees Deputy Tara Graeme standing in uniform, hesitant smile on her face.

“Stiles,” she says, almost a gasp.

She’s the interim Sheriff, Stiles remembers suddenly, until the next election that’s coming in a month. There’s not much contention over whether she’ll win. Stiles is bitter he isn’t old enough to vote.

She grabs at his shoulder like she isn’t quite convinced he’s real.

“Stiles,” she repeats softer. “I think you’ve gotten a little taller, you damn weed.”

Stiles swallows, shrugs. “I dunno.”

“Parrish is here too, he’ll be happy to see you. Hell, half the department is here. Oh, honey.”

“Didn’t know the department supported anti-supernatural functions,” Stiles mumbles.

“We go to all of these things, you know that. The Hales will be hosting a potluck next month, and they buy just as many votes and supporters as the Argents,” Deputy Graeme tells him. She sighs, embittered. “Now, it’s my turn to buy votes.”

“Tara!” Mrs. Argent calls happily, calling them over to her crowd. “You found our boy, I see.”

Stiles sees Deputy Graeme’s lips tighten. She never tolerated much political maneuvering, and always maintained the Argents did little else. Stiles is actually surprised to see her here because of that, but something must be going on because Deputy Graeme puts her arm on Stiles’ shoulder and leads him to the waiting onlookers.

“Everyone, Stiles Stilinski,” Mrs. Argent gestures. “Son to the late Sheriff who has been tragically taken from us.”

She turns to Stiles, face intensely sincere.

“Stiles, these people are representatives of our community. Hard workers who, like you, have put their hearts into this town.”

Stiles glances them over.

They look at him like he isn’t much, like they were expecting something more than a kid in board shorts and flipflops. They’re as empty-eyed and passionless as Stiles might have guessed. Has the dead parent plot already lost its sympathetic appeal? Maybe it’s his age. Stiles blames the film industry for orphan inflation. They’re desensitized.

“Stiles,” Mrs. Argent says, and his attention snaps back to her. “Each and every one of us feels your pain. That’s why we’re interested in holding a service at town hall for all of Beacon Hill’s fine officers lost to supernatural violence. In memory of your father.”

Stiles looks at Deputy Graeme, wordless. Mrs. Argent continues.

“We would like for you to attend of course, and receive a Medal of Honor in John Stilinski’s name.”

Stiles stares at the crowd, disconnected from everything. Mrs. Argent goes on talking, about the service and the speeches and the “community-wide grief, Stiles, think of it,” but Stiles floats away from it, the heat and the smell of cut grass and the sound of neighborhood sprinklers like a weight, chewing on him, weathering him.

“We just want to honor him,” Deputy Graeme whispers, cupping his cheek.

Stiles used to crawl under her desk and play with his hotwheels while she worked, used to tie and untie her shoes, draw dinosaurs on her khakis in blue pen, and get in so much trouble. She gave him his first sip of coffee, let him flip on the sirens and talk through the radio in her service car. She guided him for his first bullseye at the shooting range.

Got his dad to stop drinking.

“So what do you say?” Victoria Argent asks loudly, hand on his shoulder.

—

Stiles drives home after the barbecue, _his_ home. He takes a left on Oakridge, winds through the neighborhood he’s known his whole life. Rounding the corner, Stiles expects to see the cruiser in the driveway, a reflex he hasn’t managed to grow out of. There’s no one there but the overflowing bouquets and baskets that spill from the mailbox and porch. He wonders how many of the well-wishers are friends and how many are Victoria Argent’s clan looking to make an impression.

He walks up the steps with lead feet, kicks a wilting cluster of daffodils out of the way.

The air inside the house is stagnant and muggy now, and he’s been away so long, he can actually smell the scent of his own home. Like he’s a visitor. He spends a few minutes just circling downstairs. Disturbs the dust, touches everything. He sits on the couch in the same divot that’s been there since his butt made it after years of use.

He goes to the kitchen and climbs up on the table because no one is here and he can, and stomps his feets around on it.

None of it feels like it’s really there anymore.   

Stiles sits down on the table, face in his hands. He touches the scratches in the wood, rubs at the raised marks on the surface. Each owns a story, an origin, most forgotten or never known, but every one familiar.  

He hears footsteps walk across the second floor.

Stiles snaps up, heart racing. He stays there, suspended for a second, waiting.

The creak of a door, a voice.

“Who’s there?” he calls, hoarse. Then softer, “Dad?”

He goes upstairs slowly, neck craned. Every step creaks, the house unsettled in emptiness. There’s no other sound in the house, no wheeze of an air conditioner or spin of a fan. His breath bounces noisily. He reaches the top, and peers up and down the hall. All the doors are closed but one.

Stiles passes his room, the bathroom. He stops outside his dad’s room, then pushes the door the rest of the way. Everything that should be there is there, except for that which he wants the most.

It may as well be completely empty.

In a haze, Stiles walks to the bed and falls onto it. Dust plumes up into the air, darting around and burning yellow in the fading light of late afternoon. He rolls over onto his stomach, face pressed into the top cover. It smells like dust, like the hall closet. He crawls up, peels the tucked sheets back and crawls under on his dad’s side. He burrows, curling into a ball, blankets pulled over his head. The light is sealed out, and the only sound is his own shuddered breathing. Just him.

Stiles breathes in the smell of the sheets, nearly smothering himself. He’s crying already, and when his nose stops up, he bites on the sheets, and sobs, and screams, and sucks on the fabric so he can better feed on what’s gone.

—

He wakes up later to a blaring alarm clock, reaches out for a split second before remembering. He’s soaked in sweat, a pounding headache pulsing in time with the roar of crickets.

It’s dark out now, and for a second, Stiles swears he sees the shadow of a body moving by the dresser, the dreamy echo of a voice lingering with the alarm tone, wondering _Where’s my other sock gone?_

He blinks, alone.

The alarm screams.

Stiles leaves with his dad’s pillow under his arm.

—

He gets back to the Hale houses just as they’re winding down for bed. Donnie is on a conference call in her office, Malia has finished her homework and is arguing for another hour of Minecraft, and Peter is enduring it with patience.

“You're back late. How was the barbecue?” Peter asks, still openly disapproving that Stiles had been made to go at all.

“Oh you know,” Stiles drawls. “A gathering of people who hate werewolves, so. Everyone was arguing over who gets basic human rights. Only hear one slur, which I think is progress. Oh and Mrs. Argent is planning a memorial service for my dad. Because I asked for that.”

Peter grabs onto both of Stiles’ shoulders, hands kneading into the muscle of his neck. Erasing the scent of Hunters.

“I’m sure Talia would be happy to host an identical, but infinitely better service for him at exactly the same time if you were to ask her for it, and it would have nothing to do with outcompeting Victoria Argent.”

Stiles laughs a little.

He sobers quickly, though, exhausted.

“Why can’t they just stop?”

Peter sits him down in a barstool and gets him a bottle of root beer.

“Things will be different when Laura is Alpha,” he assures Stiles, popping off the top with a claw and sticking a bright, curly straw into the bottle. “She’s in talks with Allison.”

Huh.

“She’ll want to start including you soon,” Peter says with proud smile.

“But I’m not any good at being an Emissary!”

Peter passes him the bottle. “You’re doing fine. There’s no rush.”

Donnie comes out of her office then, kisses Peter on the mouth and Stiles on the head. Stiles feels himself flush.

“I’m heading to bed,” she says, smiling over her shoulder at Peter as she disappears down the hall. “Malia, off the xBox!”

Stiles nurses his root beer for a few minutes. Eventually, Malia trails into the kitchen, huffing about bedtimes.

“I’m nearly _fourteen_ , Liam and Hayden get to stay up as late as they want! I’m the only high-schooler with a curfew, this house is so backwards!”

Stiles glances at the clock on the microwave. It’s nearly midnight.

She rummages through the cabinets throughout her rant, finds a poptart to take up to her room, and pauses to kiss Peter, though with a scowl.

“Night, daddy.”

“Night, baby.”

Malia stomps loudly up the stairs.

Stiles finishes his drink, and Peter throws it in their recycling for him.

Stiles stands, heart in his throat. Peter doesn’t ask him why he’s suddenly so nervous, why the sound of his pulse is filling up the room. He knowns Peter can hear it.

_Harmless, really_ , Deucalion had said. _A little kiss._

It’s just that, the whole Hale family does it.

It’s okay for Stiles to do it too, surely.

“Um,” Stiles stutters. He reaches up on his toes, almost identical to how he’d reach up for Deucalion but completely different in the most important ways, and kisses Peter right on the corner of his lips where Malia had. It’s small and quick, and Stiles steps away after less than a second. Like it’s nothing.

“Good night,” he chokes, holding his breath. His skin buzzes a little with the lingering feel of stubble.

Peter looks at him, mouth slightly parted. He might say something, but. He shakes his head, pats Stiles on the shoulder, an odd twist to his mouth.

“Good night, firefly.”


	7. Chapter 7

It’s weird living with the Hales, in ways that keep reminding Stiles how small the sphere of his home had been. Where he’s used to being all on his own, there are at least two other people clamoring underfoot. There’s always someone rummaging in the kitchen, someone fighting for couch space in one of the living rooms. Three people squeezed in the laundry room, or elbowing each other over bathroom sinks. He’s counted the number of bathrooms dispersed over the Hale property, and thinks there’s plenty of room. They just seem to prefer being mashed together all the time.

Stiles isn’t sure he can remember any significant stretch of silence since moving to the Preserve.

There’s an inescapable stillness when you’re used to being the only one in a house.

The Hales embody movement.

It’s smothering in ways he doesn’t expect, makes him want to crawl in the small, quiet places in the woods, curl up with the briars and grow moss. Sometimes, he even goes to Deaton to be folded into his little corner and left alone for hours.

Sometimes he doesn’t remember anything from his sessions with Deaton, how he got there or when he left. It’s like Deaton can take away his existence.

“Stand in your circle, Stiles.”

“No talking today, Stiles.”

“I know you can be good, Stiles.”

It’s jarring when he comes back into the unconstrained and celebrated disorder outside.

Stiles hasn’t done his own laundry in weeks.

The dishes appear in the sink in small mountains and disappear again with the wind.

Grocery shopping responsibility rotates every month. Creating the shopping list is a highly involved, pack-wide effort.

Mostly, it’s loud arguing over who wants to eat what for the next few weeks.

“God help me if I see another jug of extra pulpy orange juice,” Talia complains snatching the lengthy list from under Laura’s hands and scratching the juice out.

“I like the pulp,” Roman frowns at her, arms crossed. “We always get the juice _you_ like.”

“I’m the Alpha.”

“I want a cake,” Malia chirps, “with chocolate chips. And mint icing.”

“Ugh, what’s wrong with you? _Mint_?”

“Can we get cool ranch Doritos?”

“I want to try making macaroons.”

Derek has managed to sneak the list into his own possession and is scribbling things down like a fiend.

“ _Children_ ,” Laura snaps, grabbing the paper and balling it up, starting over completely. “We have a system. The _system_ says: two desserts, four snacks, three new recipes.”

It takes hours to hash it out to everyone’s satisfaction. At the end, Peter writes Reese's cups while everyone is turned away and gives Stiles a wink.

“No way,” he says automatically. “Your heart—”

His mouth clamps shut, and Peter looks at him quizzically.

 _Your heart medication_.

But that’s not right.

_No candy. No grease. No red meats, daddy._

“I like Reese's,” he mumbles instead.

“Perfect combinations are rare in an imperfect world,” Peter says with a soft smile.

Stiles feels his mouth go dry, and Peter has that look, that expression right after Stiles kissed him goodnight.

“What?” he asks, and Peter shrugs.

“Chocolate and peanut butter.”

“Excuse you, chocolate and mint are the ultimate combination,” Malia interjects, draping herself on Peter’s back.

“You must be adopted,” Peter says, completely straight-faced. “Stiles is actually my long-lost pup, and you’re an impostor.”

Malia scoffs and rolls her eyes. “Whatever you say, Dad.”

“Yeah, whatever you say, Dad,” Stiles mimics.

Peter looks at him, and his face goes hot and tingly.

—

It’s louder with the Alpha pack around.

There are more midnight runs, when all the wolves shed their civilized skins and disappear until twilight the next day.

“You should run with us,” Laura offers with a grin, pulling her hair into a tight knot on top of her head. It’s early, just after the sky has gained light, and they’re gathered around the simmering fire pits outside, drinking coffee and enjoying the air before it breaks with summer heat.

“Do mine next,” Cora whines, pulling at her lank hair in frustration.

Stiles eyes their ethereal athleticism nervously. He’s curled in a chair, under layers of baggy pjs.

“I’d break a leg.”

“You’d be surprised how wild the moon can make a witch,” Kali purrs. “Pack affiliation has its advantages. I’m sure you’ve discovered some of those on your own.”

Her smile makes him squeamish.

“It isn’t a bad idea,” Talia says. “It’s good for strengthening your bond to Laura. Deaton runs with me occasionally.”

“ _Deaton_ —” Stiles chokes, unable to imagine the man stumbling around naked in the wooded dark.

They all laugh, so he does too.

They’re a perfect picture. Laura combs her fingers through Cora’s bed-head until she can twist it up out of the way. Roman passes Derek a cup of tea with an affectionate scent marking to his cheek. Donnie is twisting strings of smoke into shapes as they rise from the fire. Even the Alpha pack is soaking in the tranquility of the moment, pressed into the raw earth and unspooling.

He startles when Peter drapes his arm over his shoulders and presses his nose to his hair.

“It shouldn’t be so surprising. I took you out to the Preserve your first week here to formally introduce you to the land. It will protect you.”

Stiles thinks of their camping trip, of the crystal lake and the mud, the warmth of Peter’s body, and feels he’s in more danger than he is protected.

Deucalion remains quiet, encircled by his pack, but his eyes burn bright on Stiles the whole morning.

“Fine. I hope you budgeted for human hospital bills when you decided to take me in, Mr. Warbucks.”

They all laugh.

So he does too.

—

When his mom died, Stiles saw her everywhere. She appeared in the turned backs of women walking away, a similar haircut or voice; in stranded scents floating by that he’d follow with a twist of his neck, breathing it in before it disappeared forever; in his mirror when he made faces, moved his mouth a certain way.

Dad acted like he hated it, the resemblance. How he’d hesitate to look at Stiles, glance at him from the corner of his eye, scared. But Stiles could tell his dad preferred it.

_She was the most beautiful thing I ever saw until she gave me you._

—

Cora scores the winning goal their first lacrosse game.

The whole stands come alive with her every move, the Hale pack cheering louder than the rest of the crowd. Where they’re usually reserved in integrated society, they howl and bark, and Cora turns to grin at them, eyes flashing yellow every time.

She stands out so much, Stiles hears Lydia from the bench behind him say, “Forget Jackson, I should get Cora to go to Homecoming with me.”

Kira, on rotation for midfield in the second half, looks over her shoulder to glare.

The school photographer probably has a million shots of Cora mid-motion, her eyes a yellow streak cutting across each one. There were ten in last year’s yearbook.

Stiles and Scott continue their bench warming tradition, but somehow, it doesn’t feel as bad as he thought it would. Coach Finstock screams at them as equally as he does the actual players, and there’s something specific about the way Talia had said they’d be cheering for Cora _and_ him. Something warm.

It isn’t like this was something he and his dad bonded over particularly. Most games, his dad was on duty.

Honestly, Stiles prefers the bench. If Scott is allowed on the field, he can watch without distraction, keep an eye out for any asthma trouble. He isn’t much for the contact part of lacrosse either, that jarring feeling of his brain meeting the back of his skull when he’s hit. He hates running. Stiles has no idea what the Hales will expect of him on their Run, but he hopes it isn’t much. He’s seen Donnie strap on her sneakers and knee braces, and come back from the woods the next morning limping and run ragged, dirt smudged everywhere. She doesn’t seem to mind though.

Stiles wonders if the wild will ever suit him half as well.

The game spirals away from the other team, Devenford, the longer they play. They have Supernaturals to match, but their defenders scatter as Jackson and Cora spearhead the field over and over.

It’s over, and the whole team floods onto the field.

They stream together with their red reflective jerseys, hands clasping hands. Victory overshadows high school elitism for the time being. Even Jackson can’t hold back the creep of scales on his face as he and the other Cyclones shout.

“Did you see me cradle the ball between those giant defenders?” Cora laughs on their way to the locker rooms. “Man, if it were a game of just ‘weres, I’d have done a flip _riiight_ over their heads.”

“Yeah, ‘cause your fucking skyhigh roundoff wasn’t impressive enough,” Gwen laughs.

“Doesn’t count as a flip if my hands touch the ground during rotation. It’s allowed.”

“You were great,” Kira says, stars in her eyes.

“Thanks, babe,” Cora smirks, kissing her flushed cheek. “You were, too. That was a pretty great slide when you were on defense.”

Matt Daehler and Jackson make their usual comments in the locker room afterwards, mostly about what a waste of space he and Scott are for the team.

“Would have had better luck trying out for cheerleading,” Matt sneers.

“You just want to see me in a skirt,” Stiles retorts.

“Dude, can _you_ do a back-flip? Cheerleading is hard,” Scott says, defending the honor of cheerleaders everywhere.

“Sure, and volleyball’s a sport,” Jackson laughs.

The whole team and their supporters go to the Jalapenos around the corner for dinner. Malia and Derek are waiting by the jeep in the crowded parking lot when Stiles and Scott finally get all their gear packed up.

“You guys smell,” Malia complains, weirdly agitated.

“Could’ve ridden with mom,” Derek says, cramming his massive figure into the back with Malia and two duffel bags of sweaty equipment.

“Ugh, no. Aunt Talia and Aunt Roman won’t stop arguing about the damn pulp in the orange juice, and I’m ninety percent sure it’s some weird form of foreplay.”

“Ugh,” Derek mimics with a smile.

“Plus, Dad wants me to see what you guys think of me trying out for the team next year.”

Malia looks like this is the worst burden she could bear. Stiles starts the jeep, and it rumbles to life with little complaint.

“Why didn’t you try out?” Stiles asks.

He sees her shrug in the rear view mirror, mouth pulling down on one side.

“It’s too masculine, and I—” she stops. “Well, it’s harder for people to think of me as a girl if I do that stuff.”

“You could try the volleyball team?” Stiles suggests, hoping he’s not making her feel worse. “Dudes like Jackson seem to think it’s feminine enough.”

She shrugs again.

“Maybe.”

“Or archery,” Stiles says slyly.

Scott predictably lights up at the mention. “Allison is captain this year.”

Malia laughs.

“I’m not dumb enough to walk into the same room as an Argent with arrows.”

Derek don’t approve, scowling at the window as they crawl through the after-game traffic.

“The Argents aren’t a joke. They’re dangerous.”

“Allison isn’t Kate,” Malia mutters.

“Who is Kate?” Scott asks.

—

Eight years ago, while Stiles starts getting used to his mother forgetting his name, and his dad works more and more and says less and less, the Hales are fighting for updated negotiations with the local Hunter clan, and Kate Argent is planning to kill them.

As part of the Hunter convoy allowed on Hale property, she takes careful note of the houses, the exits, the amount of time it takes to get back to the road. The Hales reveal to them the vulnerable parts of their lives in an effort to appeal to a group that thinks them less than human. They think it will weaken the Hunters’ resolve.

Kate uses her status as ambassador to engender trust. She’s charming, sharp, wolfish. She and Laura find lots of common ground. It’s dubbed prematurely an unprecedented success. Kate gets close to the young ones, a young boy in particular. Not quite a young man, he just wants to share his world with an interested and beautiful outsider.

She’s caught three weeks later sneaking by the Hale houses in the middle of the night, planting mountain ash under the windowsills and door jams. There are six jugs of lighter fluid in the trunk of her car and a duffel bag of ammunition.

Victoria Argent appeals for an intra-clan trial.

California courts deny her request, and Kate is executed on Hale land by Alpha Talia.

Negotiations afterward are quick.

—

“Where is Cora?” Roman asks as they squeeze themselves into the Jalapenos tables.

“Probably still making out with Kira in the locker rooms,” Malia says.

“As long as they’re being safe,” Talia says without rise.

Malia makes a disgusted face.

“Is, um,” Stiles licks his dry lips. “Is Peter coming for dinner?”

Talia looks at him quietly for a second too long.

“He and Laura are taking care of the Alpha pack tonight. They left with Donnie and my parents after the game.”

“Oh,” Stiles goes for nonchalant. “Cool.”

Cora and Kira arrive to cheering and whistling, and they are absorbed into the tables with the rest.

Finstock stands and whistles for attention.

“Team,” he says emphatically, raising his glass of definitely-not-beer. “You’re like my kids. My obnoxious kids that I get paid to yell at all day. And then you get to take that quality parenting and beat other kids with a stick. And that’s beautiful.”

He clears his throat in the silence, appearing to grow uncomfortably emotional.

“Hell of a first game. Cora,” he raises his glass an extra inch, and almost spills its contents down his arm. “What a show. Congrats on game player. You’re my favorite until someone does better. Go Cyclones!”

“I can’t believe he got tenure,” Talia mutters into her cup.

“He grows on you,” Stiles says. “Like fungus.”

“I don’t see why Hale should get player of the game. When was the last time a human got it?” Matt whines loudly.

Stiles is sitting on the other end of a stretch of seven tables mashed together, and can still somehow hear Matt complaining.

“Shut up, Matt,” someone on the team shouts.

Matt is struck in the face with a greasy napkin.

“Yeah, get good.”

“It’s not like it’s a real award. Finstock gave it to himself like four times last season. For _blowing his whistle_ the best.”

“Sounds like porn.”

“Ew.”

They all laugh, even Matt, racism soothed by a dick joke.

“If you have a complaint,” Talia says loudly over the tables, smile feral, “about the Supernatural activity in Beacon county, you are more than welcome to come to me.”

Matt nearly swallows a nacho chip whole.

“No, no ma’am, miss Alpha ma’am.”

Talia reclines in her seat, appeased.

“Should I start calling you that?” Roman murmurs, laughing. “Miss Alpha ma’am?”

“For special occasions, maybe.”

Malia gags.

—

“I don’t think anyone pictures an accountant when they think of the Alpha’s Second,” Stiles says, folding up a stray sheet of paper into a plane. It’s probably an important government document, but that doesn’t stop Stiles from shooting it across Peter’s office.

“What do people normally think of then?” Peter asks, crafting his own paper plane.

Stiles collapses further down on the couch cushions and stares at the ceiling.

“I don’t know. The violent enforcer. The shady guy who does the deeds too dirty for the Alpha to do herself.”

A plane soars over his head and crashlands in the corner.

“I don’t see why the two should be mutually exclusive. How do you know accounting isn’t my cover?”

Stiles looks over at Peter, in his heather grey cardigan and fake glasses and white linen pants. He’s grinning wickedly, and Stiles has to stare up at the ceiling and try his hardest to ignore the coiling heat in his stomach.

He wonders what made Peter’s Beta eyes go blue but isn’t brave enough to ask.

The sound of typing and papers shuffling fills the small office as Peter gets back to work. He mutters to himself occasionally, quiet complaints and nonsensical sentences. Stiles traces the shape of Peter’s words with his own mouth, forming the phrases with his face turned away, lingers on the feeling of his lips going round with vowels. It feels something like a kiss.

He folds paper to focus on something other than his own flustered musing.

“Hey, don’t I get a wish if I fold a thousand of these?”

“That’s if you fold _cranes_ ,” Peter says.

“Close enough,” Stiles mutters, folding another plane. “Do you make the wish rules or something?”

“That depends what you wish for.”

Stiles chews on his lip.

“Not telling.”

He folds another plane and throws it straight up. It swoops, grazes the ceiling, and lands back on his chest. He throws it again and again, the paper fluttering and falling, his heart following the same pattern.

“I don’t think you could hurt anyone,” Stiles says softly.

There’s a long pause.

“Not you, Firefly.”

He smiles where Peter can’t see.

—

It’s three months since his dad died.

Stiles thinks time would blur the sharp edges of a cliffhanger, but it still feels like he’s only just stepped over the edge.

They hold the memorial at the Beacon Hills Civic Center on a Sunday.

He’s been here before, for the Thanksgiving play he and Scott were in when he was six, for charity drives his dad attended. He’ll eventually come here to register as Laura’s Emissary when he officially takes the position.  

All of the senior deputies in the Sheriff’s department are in attendance, sitting in full regalia on the elevated stage. It feels like approaching a war march, with Victoria Argent’s hand clasping the back of his neck as they step up. As if she’s afraid he’ll run.

She might be right.

They’ve pulled out the very finest of Beacon Hills’ municipal garnishing; velvet seat covers, a glossy podium. There’s a spot reserved for him on the edge of the stage, thick stationery paper embossed with real gold foil. _M. “Stiles” Stilinski_.

He’s been told he doesn’t have to speak, but that Mrs. Argent will open up an opportunity for him to do so if he wishes. She had offered to provide him with a prepared script, and he shudders at the horror it might have turned out to be had he agreed.

He outright declines.

Stiles wonders what they think he has to say, and he’s disappointed he can’t think of anything. There’s this assumption that experiencing death somehow grants you with otherworldly wisdom, that when someone dies you become the spokesperson for grief.

He wonders if he could use his voice at all, even if it were pulled up by a fish hook.

Stiles scans the room, the packed crowd. There’s a line of local media crew hunched down on both sides of the stage, cameras gleaming and swiveling around.

There are other families here, too; representatives of community casualties. They look like they’re here for church. Mrs. Argent had said “deaths of supernatural circumstance.” How far back had she gone to find this many supernatural murders in little Beacon Hills? In his dad’s whole career, he can count only three.

The rest were killed by humans.

He finds Laura and Talia in the crowd, pillars in a slumped ruin of grief. They sit beside Scott and Melissa, their whispering lost in the crowd of shuffling murmurs.

Allison sits with them. She sees him looking and waves, small and awkward.

Lydia Martin sits primly in the back of the auditorium, dressed in all black, looking like Death herself. She wears the same sunglasses from the pool, eyes a sleek reflection of bright lights that makes his head hurt. Stiles wonders if she knows anyone about to be honored today other than his father, or if this is just one of those many functions of the beast inside her; the thing that compels her to funerals, to hospices. To morgues.  

“Families,” the assistant city manager, Carmichael or something, starts, standing at the podium and speaking too closely to the mic. Her voice is fuzzy and loud. The sound system whines. “Friends... ”

She pauses, delivery imbibed with a heaviness almost campy. Everyone settles to silence, silt sinking from murky waters to a dark seabed.

“We are brought here today by the love and loss that we all share in common. A grief that binds us.”

Stiles shifts in his seat. He’s wearing one of his two nicer button-downs, and the collar is stiff and itchy with sweat. It’s too reminiscent of the last time he wore his Sunday best.

He reaches up to clench at the badge clipped to his breast, it’s bent corners a soothing shape to the inside of his tender palm. The metal of his dad’s Sheriff’s badge is cool and sharp, a steady anchor.

“Everyone needs an anchor,” Deaton says.

 _Everyone needs something_ , Dad says into a beer bottle.

“We are here today seeking solace, from one another and from the memory of our fallen loved ones.”

Stiles spies from the corner of his eye Mrs. Argent mouthing the words of the city manager’s speech. She makes a frightening coach.

“Often times, it feels as though we are left behind by the community, frozen as we are by events that forever warped our lives. They celebrate picnics, fundraisers and drives while we suffer the loss of family and friends. Officers, nurses, deputies, innocents. These cherished members of the community, no matter how great or small their impact, are part of what makes Beacon Hills the city that it has become. Every one of us seeks to ease their loss. Everyone needs—”

Stiles looks up.

 _Everyone needs something_ , Dad says in the dark.

The audience is blurred and gray, their faces shadowed in black. He can’t hear the speech anymore.

He blinks, and the auditorium is normal again.

The mic screams, and everyone cringes away. Carmichael clears her throat and continues.  

“Today, as a representative of the city, we remind you that your suffering is not forgotten and that the sacrifices made in the interest of Beacon Hills is not unappreciated.”

Lydia stands, and Stiles can see her chest heaving, her dark, maroon mouth opening. She covers it with her hand.

“Today, we recognize each of these victims here as heroes, and memorialize them with this plaque as thanks for their ultimate sacrifice.”

Victoria Argent stands abruptly and motions for Stiles to follow. The city manager steps aside.

“Someone get that Banshee out of here,” Mrs. Argent hisses quietly before stepping up to the mic.

She pulls Stiles into her side and runs her hands down the front of her soft, purple blazer. She fiddles with the string of heavy pearls around her neck before settling at the podium.

“Firstly,” she says, and the room startles at her forcefulness, “thank you to everyone who came today and supported the organization of this service. It is paramount that we as members of the community recognize greatness and loss of greatness as it deserves. When I heard of Sheriff Stilinski’s passing, I could not in good conscience stand silently on the issue any longer. And I am encouraged that each of you here today feel exactly the same. Secondly…,”

Stiles stops listening.

Mrs. Argent continues to thank everyone for their contributions and attendance, in a tone that makes it sound less like gratefulness and more like a curse. She goes on to talk about how important it is to never forget how many have been lost to Supernatural violence, or to underestimate how quickly it can happen to anyone. With the amount of human loyalism and fear mongering she’s slipping into her speech, Stiles thinks she could give up a life of Hunting and be a politician full-time.

She pauses, and Stiles thinks that may be his queue, that she’s introduced him and wants him to speak.

He’s watching a couple of ushers gently take Lydia by the elbow. She resists, hand never leaving her mouth.

“Finally, the Sheriff’s Department of Awards Committee presents to you, M. Stiles Stilinski, the Medal of Honor in Sheriff John Stilinski’s name, for his courage, dedication and sacrifice.”

It’s encased in a navy, velvet box and gleams up at him. For a second he thinks he hears his dad’s voice low and soft, just behind his ear, saying some—something...

He says nothing, barely remembers to nod in acknowledgement.

The medal looks cheap up close.

Mrs. Argent has him remain standing while she calls for a single representative of the other honored families to come up and receive their own award. His heels go prickly in the stiff dress shoes, his leg jiggling. The hallow stage rattles with his every move.

They all stand on display, shoulder to shoulder when it’s done, Mrs. Argent’s little nutcracker parade, as everyone stands and claps.

Lydia stands in the middle of the aisle, her hair dripping like blood around her white face. Her lipstick is smeared and her mouth is still open, open, open.

—

He throws the medal in the trunk of the jeep with his sweaty lacrosse gear. It feels like a brand, a concession to everything Mrs. Argent believes.

He wishes he’d never gotten it.

—

“I think you’re forgetting something,” Miss Blake says. Her office is dim, and her hair casts deep shadows on her pretty face.

Stiles folds a small paper plane, smaller than the palm of his hand. He wonders if he can make it to one thousand. _Thirty-one_ , he counts. There’s a growing pile of them in his room.

“Your father isn’t dead.”

Stiles looks up. Miss Blake smiles reassuringly.

“The land here breathes with energy, like everything in this universe. Your father was born on this land and is buried in it. He has become a part of the forces that makes grass grow, forces that protect and seed and encourage. Including the burning Spark that grows inside you. He lives.”

“Not in the way that counts,” he mutters. He folds the paper viciously and gets a papercut for it.

Miss Blake slides off her desk and walks toward him in her slinky way. She places her hands over his and cradles his bleeding pointer finger.

“Everything counts, Stiles,” she says. “You can think of it in physical terms if you’re hung up on the magical ones. The Law of Thermodynamics demands that no energy is ever created or destroyed. The human body is a metropolis of chemical energy. It all has to go _somewhere_ when we die.”

“I thought you were supposed to be an English teacher.”

Miss Blake laughs and squeezes his hand.

They’re close, the smell of incense strong and cloying.

He looks down and the cut on his finger is gone.

“He’s there if you reach out for him. Whether it’s the way you want it or not, Beacon Hills preserves your father. You can’t tell me it doesn’t speak to you,” she says.

“You’re lucky, Stiles,” she says.

Stiles thinks she even believes it.

—

“Can you feel it?” Dad says through Laura’s mouth. “Everything—”

 _Everything is_ —

“—is connected.”

They’re standing in the woods.

It isn’t completely dark yet, and the moon looms over them, a fat, misshapen gibbous. This deep in the Preserve, the trees are thicker than he’s ever seen, like he’s heard about Redwood Park. He’s already lost, had gotten turned around within ten minutes of their trip. There was a road to his left at one point, where he could hear the distant drone of passing engines, but they’re too far away from it now.

Laura’s eyes glow red. She’s bare, sprouting fur and growing taller, wider. Stiles feels a pull through the soles of his naked feet, leading down, down.

Stiles shivers. It’s warm, but as the sun’s heat dwindles and his flushed skin is left in cool shadow, he becomes aware of just how vulnerable his body is. He’s not completely nude, clinging to his boxer briefs like a lifeline. Donnie had suggested he wear his sneakers to protect his feet, but he’d thought he looked strange in just his underwear and shoes.

They’re alone, just he and Laura with nothing between them but for the strange magnetism that pushes him closer.

He feels like he can hear for miles; the howling of the pack bouncing off trees and distorting their voices into warbling ghouls, the rustle of wind suddenly roaring. He could uproot trees and displace mountains tonight.

Laura grins, her teeth long and sharp.

“Isn’t it amazing?”

There’s a beastly growl in her voice, her human face splitting apart for the truer image of her soul.

“It’ll get stronger when I choose our Betas.”

He feels a strange thrill, something like a pang of desire that he isn’t sure is his. Laura holds him close and drags her nose and teeth on his jaw, marking him with her scent.

“Our pack is going to be so beautiful, Stiles.”

Words fail her then, and Stiles feels her sink into the miasma of the moon, her body clicking and creaking with the change until she towers over him.

He knows it’s time to run now, something deep inside urging it. Somewhere far away tugs on him, like a craving or a tooth ache.

They run together.

Laura loops around and behind him, lopes zigzags in a black blur, her massive form casting shadows over him every time she passes by. It’s dark, but he sees, and his feet find only smooth soil. He feels all at once disconnected from his body and wide awake, like something else has crawled into his skin. It moves his body as though it has been just waiting. It makes him manic, turns him inside out. He looks down at himself and expects to see a wolf.

When Laura howls, it vibrates the marrow from his bones, his teeth from his mouth. The whole Preserve shudders and stands on end.

Talia’s pack howls in reply, and for the first time, Stiles can feel the distinction. Laura is his, the poles of his compass. He feels her claim like fingers walking up his spine, gentle and shy. Talia is his benefactor, but not his Alpha.

They run a winding, aimless path through thick trees and steep hills. He thinks he’s tired, his lungs burning, but it’s severed, a sensation that’s been displaced right beside him rather than from within him.

Derek finds them, a sleek black wolf that’s the smaller twin to Laura. Stiles feels his awareness of Derek bloom like sparks in the base of his neck, a recognition of the common point they share in Laura, their sun.

He can imagine it unspooling for new Betas, their little solar system expanding until it can’t anymore.

Laura herds them in a direction he can’t even guess, nipping at his heels and barking out high laughter. She’d make a good lacrosse coach like this.

The animal voices of the Hale and Alpha packs draw nearer until they converge, and where Stiles felt emboldened and perfect before, now he’s just almost naked and far away from home. He gasps for breath, and for the first time feels the sweat soaking his back.

Their eyes glow on him, gold and blue and red. He curls into Laura’s side. Her heart thumps through her massive rib cage. When Talia steps into view, it’s like all the oxygen is burned from the air. They’re all larger than normal wolves, at least twice as much, but Talia outsizes them all. The very trees of the Preserve bend away from her.

She tips her head up and howls, and the rest follow suit. Stiles feels his voice rip from his open mouth before he can even think about it.

Something about the ritual makes him feel complete.  

“Stiles,” Donnie says, stepping up to him and checking him over. She smiles and rubs her hand over his wet forehead. “There’s a place for us to rest not too far ahead.”

The wolves circle around them as they start to run again. He can see the glare of red eyes as they peek at him from behind trees, the Alpha pack running on the fringes of their group. He’s glad they don’t stray closer. Stiles finds Peter, a brownish-grey wolf, weaving between the others, followed by a small grey coyote.

When Peter winds his way to Stiles’ side, he can’t tell if the warmth in his chest is a bond or something he’s imagining. Stiles selfishly runs his fingers over Peter’s thick fur. It’s not as soft as he expects, coarse like a strange armor. He imagines climbing up his huge shoulders and riding on his back like a Miyazaki character.

The wolves disperse after a while, and Donnie stops him in a small clearing. She uncovers a trap door buried in leaves and loose soil, and pulls out a heavy duffel bag.

“Supplies for us humans,” she shrugs, pulling out a couple of water bottles, thermal blankets, and a first aid kit. “Let’s see your feet, kiddo.”

She spreads one of the blankets out, and they both sit.

The soles of his feet are tender and sore. There’s a blister he can feel forming right under his toes, and a mud caked gash on his left heel. He doesn’t remember how or when it happened.

“Was it hard being the only human in the pack?” Stiles asks. “I mean, unless you count Deaton.”

No one counts Deaton, he decides for himself privately.

Donnie rubs at his feet with a cool wet-wipe.

“I never thought of myself as a separate entity in that way. My pack before I married Peter was a good mix of human and ‘were, and the Hale pack is the same when we’re all together. You’ll recall,” she says, eyebrows raised.

Stiles thinks back to the reunion, the sheer number of people packed in the Hale houses, and shudders.

“Hard to forget. How often do you all get together?”

Donnie smiles but doesn’t answer.

“When you grow up in a wolf pack, you consider yourself as part of the supernatural. It’s a cultural thing that humans outside of supernatural life don’t see easily.”

She finishes doctoring Stiles’ feet and gestures to the cold fire pit in the center of their little nook.

“I want you to try lighting that.”

Stiles pulls a face.

“Stiles,” Donnie sighs. “If you put half as much energy into your Spark as you did in your self-flagellation, you’d start a forest fire.”

“You can’t say that, I’m an orphan. I’m entitled to self-flagellation. I practically own the rights to it.”

“Light the fire,” Donnie demands.

Stiles huffs and stares at the cold pile of twigs and leaves. He feels that pulsing, distant tug, something that goes deep in the woods. He thinks maybe it’s Laura, their bond warm, light the fire he’s trying to conjure. Maybe it’s the moon in some way, even. Maybe… Stiles feels his neck grow hot and thinks in a whisper, hesitant, maybe it’s Peter.

The firepit combusts with a soft pop.

“Hey!” Donnie crows. “Look at that!”

Stiles looks at her, dark skin lit in the warm orange light. Her wedding band gleams.

Stiles stands abruptly, and the fire chokes on itself into a curdling black smoke.

“Well, it’s a start,” Donnie coughs. “At least you lit it.”

“I’m going to go find Laura,” he says.

“Alone?” Donnie asks, waving smoke out of her face.

“I can feel her,” he says, he thinks.

“I guess it’s fine,” Donnie says. “Even if you get lost, they’d find you. The moon is strong tonight, and the Preserve will protect you.”

Stiles leaves the small clearing behind as Donnie revives the fire with a wiggle of her fingers and a hand full of dry leaves.

Alone, the Preserve has a different personality. Everything seems foreign and undisturbed, prehistoric. The trees swallow him up in glowing darkness, and a yearning beats within him alongside his pulse. Stiles stands still to feel it out, listening to the bugs and the calls of animal nightlife. He takes a step, changes direction, and walks.

The tugging grows a little stronger, and he follows it.

There’s an occasional howl and bark, a chorus of wild songs that bounce around the treetops and sink low to Stiles’ ears. It chases him as he picks his way through the thicket, trying to find something familiar as he follows the urging inside. He walks out of his hesitance, further and further. His feet find the pounding rhythm that vibrates through his bones, a frenzied call. It’s can’t be Laura, Stiles thinks. She hadn’t felt this way. He walks until he realizes with a stumble that he’s started running again.

When?

He stops, panting, and looks around. The Preserve stretches out endless in all directions.

“You’re far away from your Alpha.”

Stiles jumps.

Deucalion leans against the thick trunk of a tree, eyes glowing as always.

“I was just heading her way,” he says, hastily walking off, follows the pull, straining his eyes

“Sweet boy, you won’t find Laura that way.”

Deucalion walks toward him, his taloned feet scarring the ground with every slow step. There’s dirt streaking up his legs and arms, his claws blackened with mud.

“But…,” his heart pounds, “I can feel her.”

The Alpha laughs, and it rolls over Stiles’ bare skin like rain, cold.

“I’m sure you feel _something_. It’s natural; there’s a force that lives in these wilds even more powerful than an Alpha.”

“What is it?”

Deucalion tuts, his eyes slitting with his grin.

“Perhaps you’re willing to buy the answer from me? We’ve traded successfully like this before.”

Stiles’ mouth feels dry, his hands sweat-sticky. Deucalion is very close to him now, and he breathes through an open mouth over Stiles’ face, his sharp teeth passively bared. He can feel the warmth radiating off of him.

“I can taste your desperation in the air,” Deucalion whispers. “It hangs off of you, stinks up every room. I could track you for miles.”

Stiles swallows.

“What are you talking about?”

“I passed by your little memorial. Argent is as eloquent as she is unsubtle. Oh, Stiles,” Deucalion sighs as his fingers dip just slightly into the waistband of Stiles’ briefs, and he nearly jumps out of skin. “I heard your deputies talking afterward. They say such sweet things about you.”

He feels hot and choked, Deucalion’s fingers teasing where they play around his hip bones and lower. His knuckles leave trails of grainy soil on his belly.

“How you took care of your daddy all those years after your mother died, kept house while he worked those long hours. You must have been so lonely. Daddy’s pitiful, good little wife.”

“Stop,” Stiles chokes, barely a whisper.

Deucalion abandons Stiles’ underwear and slides his burning palms up the back of his thighs.

“Is that what’s wrong now? Peter already has a wife so you don’t know what to do?”

“Stop!”

He shoves at the man’s chest and spins around to run. Deucalion catches him from behind, grabs him by the thighs and lifts until he’s off the ground and helpless. He writhes in the air, trying to get away.

“Don’t be embarrassed, darling,” he purrs into his ear. “Why, if you’d found him before his little Malia arrived, Peter would have given you exactly what you need.”

Stiles hates, _hates_ that it makes him pause, that he falls still, panting.

“He and I used to have much in common in that way.”

Deucalion cups him through his briefs with a firm hand. Stiles yelps, his body jerking, and Deucalion laughs. It rattles him all the way through, unfurls the strength of his resistance with overwhelming shame. He can feel his skin bloom with it. His toes drag in moist, upturned soil.

“I’m not,” he swallows, voice weak. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”

He hasn’t tried anything, hasn’t tried _taking_ Peter. He hasn’t done anything wrong.

It was just a kiss, he tells himself desperately.

“Of course not,” Deucalion coos into his nape, his mouth and teeth pressing against him. He drags in a deep inhale. ”Boys like you can’t help it.”

Stiles’ eyes burn, and he rubs at them with his knuckles. Deucalion turns him around so they’re face to face, takes his fists in his own. He drags his hot tongue up Stiles’ cheek where a tear has just begun to bead. It makes his stomach twist terribly, his cheek cold from the man’s spit.

“I knew what you were the moment I set eyes on you. Trailing after Peter knowing we can all smell how wet you are. Why, it’s practically a crime Peter hasn’t put you out of your misery.”

Deucalion backs them up against a tree, cages him in. It’s rough on his back, skin tender and human thin.

“It’s all right; you don’t have to wait any more. I’ll give you what you need,” he’s murmuring along Stiles’ temple, his hands stroking over him. There’s a warm hardness grinding relentlessly between his legs.

He clutches helplessly at Deucalion’s arms, heart pounding. He looks over Deucalion’s shoulder into the darkness of the trees around them. He imagines someone finding them; Laura or one of the other Alphas. Their reactions humiliating and searing.

He imagines it’s Peter here, running his soothing hands all over his face and arms, scenting, claiming; saying _it’s okay, you can’t help it_.

He imagines himself telling Peter everything then, how gentle and understanding he would be.

Deucalion licks at his open mouth.

Stiles closes his eyes.

It’s Peter.

_It’s not your fault, baby._

It’s Peter.

Deucalion groans.

Peter doesn’t come.

—

Stiles wakes up in the Preserve to someone calling his name.

He opens his eyes, the bright morning sky peeking through a lush green canopy. He sits up, the skin of his stomach and thighs pulling with a dry flakiness. He feels itchy, grimy. He can feel the sting of stubble burn on his neck and mouth.  

The forest whispers a morning song, birds and small critters chirping alike, and among it, murmurs softly _Stiles_ , over and over in a voice he’s always listening for but can never hear. He looks around, wary.

He’s alone.

He lays back down on the gritty earth, stretching his aching limbs. The whisper grows to a roar.

Stiles takes a shaky breath.

Very slowly, deliberately, he rolls onto his side and lowers his ear until it’s pressed firmly into the dirt.

It chants _Stiles, Stiles, Stiles._


	8. Chapter 8

 

The Preserve is silent as Stiles roams over it’s loamy flesh aimlessly.

Where it had so much to say the night previous, pulling him, coaxing him deeper into its realm, it says nothing now. The murmur of trees groaning toward the sun as it rises, the tinkling if leaves like holiday bells; their voices are empty.

He’s thirsty, dreadfully so, and there’s a taste in his mouth that’s something like dirt, something like mushrooms.

He finds four thin scratches on his left hip bone, and his fingers run over and over the tender scabs. He can’t resist picking at them. There’s the promise of a bruise at his wrist, his neck, his knee. An ache that goes bone-deep and will bloom in spots that map the progress of Deucalion’s Alpha strength on his eggshell skin. He doesn't even think it was on purpose; it's just in Deucalion's nature.

Along his stomach and back, there are countless small, knobby green leaves sticking to his skin in a strange, angular pattern. He scratches at them until they flake off, leaving itchy red spots in their wake.

He finds a stream, which he thinks is a good thing if he remembers all the survival trivia that apocalypse movies have taught him. Find water, don’t eat red berries, build a fire.

Save your bullets for an emergency.

Stiles watches the water bubble, a shallow creek with a feeble current, clear and cool. He steps into it and tries to guess his chances of contracting a weird disease if he drinks it. He knows there are a few natural springs and proper wells dotting the Preserve, but perhaps it’s better not to risk botulism.

The stream comes up to his knees, cold and soothing. After a moment’s consideration, he sits.

It’s much colder on the tender warmth under his arms and around his belly. He holds his nose shut and allows himself to fall back into the water. He sinks into the cushion of leaves and fine silt, the water a soft caress as it flows down his chest and thighs.

He swam in a creek once, when he was younger.

They go camping on a long weekend, he and his dad. It was part of a golden-tinged fantasy where they planned to trek the long, two-hour drive once a year; every Memorial Day weekend. The truth is that they only ever went the once, a weekend retreat planned months in advance.

Stiles remembers the simmering anticipation, the sweat of relief when the jeep pulled into the wooded parking lot at last, and their seclusion was made certain and absolute. There would be no interruptions, no distractions, no last minute re-scheduling. Just malnourished Stiles and the promising fruit of his father’s attention.

He doesn’t particularly like camping; Stiles and his dad have always been indoor types. They packed dry foods and a cooler, no illusion of foraging or hunting. But at the time, he’d been too excited for the three-day date than he’d been uncomfortable of the heat or the bugs.

They camped by a creek.

Far away from any others, surrounded in a firry, green shroud, a coppiced kingdom. The days played like a song in their lush grove, his dad showing him _this is bear mace, this is a dressing knife, this is a pistol._

They ate sandwiches and spent three hours trying to start a fire without a starter. They laughed at _everything._

And in the nights, spun a kind of fleeting magic they’ve never recreated and never will. Stiles pulled out his star-gazing book to name the constellations, dragging his father’s finger through the air, following the connect-the-dot shapes. And every night, somewhere between Serpens and Taurus, he’d doze off with the velvety blackness of the sky as his blanket, and only wake up enough to cling to his dad as he carried him into their small tent. Burrowing like all of the other woodland creatures, warm and safe in their dens.

They hadn’t packed swimming clothes, and it took the entire first day and through half of the second to convince his dad to let him jump into the water. It took but a second to convince him to get in too.

They splashed naked in the shallow creek, chasing fish with their hands and getting sun burnt. He can still see the droplets arching in the air from his hand, breaking apart on his father’s weathered, laughing face, a looping memory. The flash of daylight sparkling in the mist, the dark hairs on his dad’s arms plastered to his skin. How his pruned hands felt.

_Mischief_ , Dad had called him, eyes soft suede. Everything glowing. Like a spell.  

Stiles opens his eyes under the water. The sun is yellow and bright, a broken series of orbs shining through the current. There is no swathe of soft blackness, no fingers to hold onto.

He thinks he can almost hear his voice in this small, cold space in the Preserve, can hear him scolding and laughing in one breath.

How many times had he dived under the water that day, a portal between worlds, and never feared he’d come back up to a universe made into a stranger? How trusting he’d been, that the wavering figure on the other side of the ripples would always be made solid when he returned.

He and dad both had come out covered in little brown leeches.

_It’s gonna be okay_ _,_ Dad said over and over as Stiles cried and wailed every time a little mouth was pulled carefully from the skin on his back.

—

“Stiles!”

Laura finds him a short while after he’s dried in the breeze and been warmed by the rising sun. Peter and Malia are close behind her, and they crowd around him, checking him for signs of harm, for malcontent.

“We couldn’t find you! Your scent; it was gone.”

Laura tucks her nose right behind his ear and inhales long and hard. Stiles feels more embarrassed by everyone’s nudity in the daylight than by moonlight. He looks at Malia and Peter from over Laura’s shoulder and tries not to let his eyes wander.

Laura sneezes.

“No wonder,” she laughs, and brushes her hand through his tacky hair. Her fingers come away with a few stray leaves, small green ones he must have missed. “How did you manage to stumble in a patch of mistletoe?”

Stiles feels a chill, swallows thickly, and looks around for any signs of the Alpha Pack; of Deucalion. Was it him moving in between the trees in the distance or just a shadow of a leggy branch? A glare of red eyes, or the refraction of golden sun?

Peter holds a soft, thick blanket at the ready, swathes him in it and rubs up and down his arms until he’s tingling with warmth.

“Where did your clothes run off to, baby?” he asks.

“I’m fine. I took a swim.”

“You’re practically blue!” Malia exclaims dramatically, then complains, “Humans are weird!”

Stiles shifts from one foot to the other nervously. He wants to shower and curl up in bed, he wants… He wants Peter to stop touching him; he doesn’t want to be touched right now. But when Peter steps back to look him over more thoroughly, he instantly misses him, follows him on tender feet and tucks his head right under Peter’s chin.

“I’m tired,” he mumbles, as an excuse, an explanation. A plea. _Let me_ , he thinks fiercely. _Let me_.

Just for a bit.

“Come on, let’s get you home.”

Peter walks him through the forest tucked under the warm wing of his arm, bare skin on Stiles’ naked shoulders.

—

“You are so...” Peter trails off. He sits on the edge of the bathtub, checking the water’s temperature. Steam coils up from the water and slithers up the walls. It’s humid in the bathroom now, and Stiles can feel the heat of the fog sticking to his skin, making him slippery.

“What?” Stiles asks, pulling his blanket tighter around his twiggy legs, watching his muddy feet leave dark prints on the ceramic tiles.

Peter looks at him, soft.

“Nothing.”

“What?” Stiles demands this time.

Peter looks down at their bare feet. Stiles wiggles his toes absently, and Peter smiles.

“I forget how fragile humans are. Finding you this morning alone in the Preserve. It felt like you were standing in the mouth of a ravenous beast.”

Stiles thinks unbidden of leeches, of Deucalion’s mouth, open and snarling and _taking_ —

“I’m  _pissed_ with—” Peter’s lips purse as though he’s shared something he hasn’t meant to. “I can’t believe Donnie let you wander off by yourself. Next time, you’ll stay with me or Laura the whole time. Anything could have happened to you.”

“I thought the Preserve is supposed to protect me.”

“The land can’t control everything. There may have been hunters lurking, or the Alpha pack could have done something careless. _Deucalion_ —”

Stiles looks away, heart racing.

Too late, he thinks. Too late, too late.

“What happened to your neck?”

Peter’s cool hands cup the thin skin under his jaw, and Stiles glances in the bathroom mirror. There’s a mottled red and purple rash where Peter soothes him; Stiles caught a glimpse of it in the mirror coming in. He tries to casually raise the blanket wrapped around him higher, to cover any other marks or bruises.

“Um, maybe the mistletoe. I could be allergic.”

Peter chuckles.

“There must be a little wolf under here somewhere,” Peter says, tugging playfully at the blanket and rubbing at Stiles’ neck still, squeezing the tendons until they roll. There is a flash of searing, supernatural blue through the skin of Peter’s eyelids.

“I have sensitive skin,” Stiles stutters.

“You must bruise easily,” Peter says, as though fascinated by the fact. “Most weres don’t bruise unless it’s a substantial injury. The healing process is too fast. Bruising is interesting, like a small nebula right under the skin. Where stars are born.”

“I think it just hurts,” Stiles says.

Peter’s eyes flicker to where his thumb grazes his neck, his touch growing feather light, almost imaginary, teasing the flesh there.

“Of course, there’s that,” and it looks as though Peter might add more, but he doesn’t.

You can hurt me, Stiles thinks. I’d let you hurt me.

“I-I think I have it from here,” he blurts instead, stepping around Peter to the bath.

Peter looks up, eyes sharp.

When Stiles only hovers by the tub without looking up at him, Peter seems to give in.

“We must seem overbearing compared to what you’re used to.”

Stiles feels like he’s been delivered a backhanded insult.

He knows his dad wasn’t perfect. He was the Sheriff, he had to put in a lot of hours, it was to protect everyone, including Stiles; it was for the best, it’s okay.

Dad comes home at three am, drinks some scotch, and stumbles with loud boots up to bed, and it’s okay. Stiles wakes up to his dad tucking the covers tighter around him, a kiss that burns on his temple like rubbing alcohol, and it’s fine.

When he gets up the next morning, he’s already gone on the next shift, a note on the counter about groceries or a city function or whatever, and it’s next to all the other notes that litter the house, tiny slips that Stiles keeps in a box now, and it was like that every goddamn day, every fucking day, Monday through Sunday, birthdays, holidays, anniversaries.

“I like it,” he says hoarsely.   

Peter pats him on the arm and leaves him alone to take his bath.

He almost calls him back just to see what would happen.

—

Stiles thinks, he has a lot to thank Talia for. She’s given him a home, a support system. She’s given him a future.

When Stiles steps into Deaton’s lab, he thinks these things often, home, support, future, a sort of fortification that lies over his breast like pleated scales. He thinks of Talia, her generosity, and walks into Deaton’s work space to find the room vastly rearranged. At the center of the room, where the large island counter and sink is usually standing, there is a large, ceramic bath tub. Talia stands near it with Laura, and Deaton is bent to the base of the tub, smearing something dark red on the floor.

Stiles hangs in the door jam, uncertain. They all turn to look at Stiles, and he gulps, wondering just what sort of fresh hell he’s walked into.

I didn’t do anything, he thinks immediately. Peter filled the bath for him and made sure he was all right, and nothing happened. Stiles sent him away. He’s good. He’s a good—

“Ah, Stiles,” Deaton says, beckoning him over with a hand.

Stiles tarries by the door.

“I can come back later,” he tries, taking a step backwards.

“Actually,” Talia says, looking speculative. “Alan, what if Stiles does the spell?”

They look at him harder now, dissecting him.

Stiles looks at the bath. He can see, now that Deaton has stepped back, that the tub is encircled by an intricate spell circle. He can’t read any of the runes from here.

“What… what kind of spell is it?”

“A locator spell,” Deaton says, at the same time Laura says “A binding spell.”

She scowls at Deaton. “It’s both, and it’s too dangerous for Stiles.”

Talia approaches Stiles, hand low on his back. She draws him into the room, a hand tracing his cheek.

“He’s young. Full of vitality. The spell doesn’t need any special skill. Just something to hold on to for a bit.”

Deaton tilts his head, considering.

“What are you trying to find?” Stiles asks. He’s seen the maps, of Beacon County, the Preserve, of all of California, in Laura’s office, marked with circles, stars and crosses.

“That doesn’t matter,” Talia says, leading Stiles until he’s standing right before bathtub, toes mere moments from Deaton’s circle. This close, he notices the bath is packed with watery ice, and he feels a chill just watching it bob around. “Think of it as part of your training.”

Stiles isn’t stupid. They’re keeping it from him; whatever they’re looking for, whatever it is.

“You’re trying to find something for the Alpha Pack,” he says. “Right?”

Laura actually smiles. “You’re very clever, Stiles.”

It’s a sort of placating compliment, meant to smother his curiosity. It’s clear she doesn’t want him involved, in either the spell or the Alpha Pack.

“So, what do I have to do?”

“Stiles,” Laura sighs.

“Nothing complicated,” Talia speaks over her. “You just have to step in the bath.”

Stiles grimaces at the ice.

“Won’t I like, get hypothermia or something?”

No one addresses that.

“It isn't a bad idea to have you perform the spell. The experience would advance your connection to the land,” Deaton says, as though thinking aloud. “A physical tether that could stabilize your Spark.”

“Or completely swallow it!” Laura yells. “It’s too dangerous. Stiles is _my_ Emissary. My word is final.”

“He isn’t your Emissary yet,” Talia says. She never looks at Stiles, her eyes glowing bright red at her daughter. “I’m the Alpha. _My_ word is final. Stiles, please undress.”

Heart in his throat, Stiles looks at Laura beseechingly, but she only looks down at her bare feet, quelled into submission. Home, support, future.

Stiles’ fingers tremble as he strips down to his boxers. It’s familiar standing before Laura, his Alpha, in his underwear. He feels all of the vulnerability of the Run and none of its strength. Deaton takes his clothes and lies them on the counter.

“What do I do?”

“Just lay in the bath,” Laura tells him gently. “You don’t have to do anything else. Just lay underwater for a little while. The spell will carry you.”

“I won’t drown?” he asks, breathing hard.

“No,” Laura says, hard. “I won’t let you. Even if it ends the spell too early.”

She looks at Deaton and Talia challengingly, but neither contradict her declaration. There’s some level of risk they’re not sharing with him. Could he die from this? Get sick?

“I don’t have to chant anything? Memorize any complicated Latin phrases?”

“No chanting,” Talia says.

“Nothing weird will happen?” he presses.

“Define weird,” Talia says, and he thinks she’s joking but she isn’t.

“All you have to do is keep your eyes open,” Deaton says. “Keep them open and look.”

Stiles nods, steps over the red line of the intricate spell circle, and a searing heat sweeps up his feet and into his stomach. It’s familiar, the tingling rush of Deaton’s circles binding him. He feels the link, him to the circle, the circle to the earth. He’s suddenly burning hot, and stepping into the icy bath sounds less like a torture and more a blessing.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Talia tells him.

It isn’t encouraging.

The first touch of icy water to the naked sole of Stiles’ foot is also too painful. He grips both sides of the tub and slowly eases himself down, trying to hold onto that impossible heat burning inside. The cold takes his breath away.

“I just… go under?” he asks weakly.

“No,” Deaton says from right behind him, his hands landing heavy on his shoulders. “I hold you under.”

He pushes, and water rushes up over Stiles, Deaton’s expressionless face the last he sees.

It floods into his ears, his nose. The cold is deeply invasive, the pressure of it pushing at his eyes from within their sockets. His first instinct is to struggle, to fight to get back up, but before he can get his muscles to unlock, Deaton’s hands, the water, the cold; it’s all gone.

He’s lying in the bottom of the creek bed. A man stands over him, peering in the water. It’s his dad. It’s Peter.

It’s Deucalion.

A hand reaches down into the water.

Stiles blinks, and he’s lying in white, white snow. Soft and sharp. Blink.

He’s lying in his bed, watching his ceiling fan spin, spin, spin. There’s a fly buzzing somewhere behind the shuttered blinds of his window, beating against the glass. It whines.

He’s lying on his father, chest to chest, nose to nose, his father inhaling Stiles’ every exhale.

Or he’s lying in a coffin.

Or on a marble slab.

Or on a tree.

Stiles can feel it, the bark, smooth and rough under his fingers, pulsing with life. The grooves are like the whorl of a fingerprint. He lies on the looping rings, pressing print to print, identity exposed.

He gasps, sits up.

He’s sitting on the center of a giant tree stump, it’s rings rippling out for miles in every direction. There’s a dripping sound, a looping blip. Wet, echoing. A heartbeat.

Stiles stands, the dry wood of the tree polished and soothing to the touch. It seems to shift under him like sand, molding to his shape, wanting.  

He turns in a circle, taking in the stark white horizon, a perfect void as far as he can see. He walks, counting the rings as he goes. Ten, eleven, twelve… He turns again and—

His dad is lying in the center of the stump. Stiles takes a step toward him, his foot sinking deep in the tree’s rings. He has to wake him, see him, hold his hand—Stiles takes a breath to call for him.

His throat fills with icy water, and the void dissolves.

Someone lifts him out of the water, and it’s a ripping sensation, as though he’s left his skin behind. Stiles squints through the tears burning in his eyes, and the bath is filled with blood. He’s wrapped in a towel, the brush of the fabric distant on his numbed skin.

There’s yelling, loud banging. Stiles coughs and coughs.

He feels wrong, he feels like something’s been _stolen_ —

“Easy, baby,” Peter whispers to him, petting his hair, rubbing his arms with a towel. “It’s over.”

Stiles’ teeth chatter.

“I’m bleeding,” he rasps. “I’m bleeding.”

Burning hands run the course of his body, every slope of him.

“It isn’t your blood, firefly.”

Stiles looks around.

Deaton is on the floor with them, a few feet away. He clutches at his own arms, hands pressed into the deep claw marks that gore him. Peter’s fingers track blood on Stiles’ bare skin.

Laura is crouched in front of Stiles, but she’s facing Talia. The room rumbles with a subsonic growl. The puddles of bloody water vibrate with her every inhale. Talia is fierce, his presence eating up the room, and her eyes glaring through enraged slits. But she doesn’t shift. Her teeth stay blunt.

When she steps toward them, Stiles curls up between Peter’s legs, some part of his brain turning him into something small and preyed-upon. Laura snarls, but Talia passes them. She goes to her knees before Deaton and takes his mangled arms, her flesh becoming lined with inky black serpents. They crawl like veins up her skin, and Deaton’s pale face relaxes.

“Stiles,” Talia says, calm. Her voice booms. She doesn’t look at him. “What did you see?”

“A tree,” he forces himself to say. “A big tree.”

“Anything else?”

“It was cut down.”

Talia does look up at that, and Stiles expects to see anger, or excitement, or recognition.

He sees fear.

“Did you see anyone there with you?” she demands.

“No,” Stiles says quickly. He doesn’t know why he lies. Why it’s important to protect.

Talia looks back to Deaton, her hands clasped tight in his.

“You need to get warm,” Peter whispers.

Stiles lets himself be picked up and carried outside.

He doesn’t feel the cold until the heat of the sun kisses him with its full strength, and suddenly he can’t stop shivering. He clutches at Peter, fingers white.

“Oh honey,” Peter sighs. “I can’t believe you let them do this.”

“What was I supposed to do!” Laura hisses, slamming Deaton’s door closed behind them. “Issue a Challenge? Put the Pack in chaos by overthrowing the Alpha I’m literally scheduled to replace?”

“You make the hard decisions like you’re supposed to!” Peter snaps.

“Won’t you be in trouble?” Stiles asks. “For hurting Deaton?”

“It isn’t for you to worry about,” Peter tells him. “Inter-pack fighting happens all the time.”

“Peter—” Laura tries. "You _challenged_ her."

“It isn’t for him to worry about.”

They argue over his head some more, but Stiles doesn’t have the strength to keep up. He rests his head on Peter’s shoulder enjoying the warmth that seeps through his skin, clogs his pores. He’s lying on the forest floor.

On a crashing storm.

On a beating heart.

—

Being an Alpha involves a lot more paperwork than Stiles anticipates.

Laura takes him to her office in the main house where there are blue, identical files stacked everywhere, each stamped neatly with a nine-digit number. There’s a corkboard on the wall covered in photos of mostly young teens smiling hopefully up at the camera in each shot.

“Hey, I go to school with her,” Stiles says, pointing to a picture of a wane Erica Reyes. He looks more closely, recognizes more students. “What is this?”

Laura and Derek move around the chaos and stand beside him.

“New Alphas get to induct three new betas into their pack,” Laura explains. “I want you to help us pick them out.”

Stiles blinks, eyes glazing over the hundred of pictures on the board, taped to the walls, and lying on Laura’s desk.

“Why aren’t the others helping?”

“The others are....” Laura trails off and looks to Derek for help.

“Auxiliary.”

“Exactly. Yes, I’ll inherit the Hale pack as a whole when I take Mom’s place, but you and Derek, as my Second and Emissary, are primary pack. You’re mine in a way that’s different from the others. And these three Betas will be too.”

“We’ll present a dozen or so options to the rest of the pack for input once we narrow it down,” Derek adds.

“But… there are _hundreds_ ,” Stiles says helplessly.

Laura’s smile is wry, tired.

“These are all the qualified applicants.”

Stiles vaguely understands the process. The Alpha heir puts in a request for three Betas with the Supernatural branch of the Federal government, and a notice is put out for people to apply. Packs can generally only request for statewide recruits, but larger, more stable packs can acquire applicants from all over. The Hales qualify for the entire Eastern half of the country.

“Generally, it’s good etiquette to take on at least one Omega to help control the rogue population,” Laura says. “We’ve divided the Omegas from the humans in this pile. I’ve already decided on the one, I think.”

There’s a bright yellow highlighter mark around Isaac Lahey’s face. Turned by a feral Alpha last year, lost control and killed his father. Stiles might have more sympathy for the late Mr. Lahey if he didn’t know he deserved a painful death. Victoria Argent, of course, mentioned him as a tragic loss at the memorial.

Isaac is in legal custody until they decide what to do with him.

“If I take him into the pack, his punishment is likely to be more lenient,” Laura says. “It wasn’t his fault.”

Stiles flips through a few files.

“What are we looking for in a Beta, exactly?” Stiles asks, looking at a picture of an elderly human woman.

“People apply for different reasons. Health problems, financial problems, the simple desire to become something else. All of that is fine, but we need people who will be happy within our particular pack hierarchy, people who will be comfortable with how secular we are from human culture. You’re more familiar with that particular hurdle. It will come in handy in the interviews.”

Interviews.

“It’s all so clinical.”

Derek laughs.

“It’s one thing that happened on its own without the influence of hunters. They hate bureaucracy as much as we do.”

“It’s a necessary evil for modern packs,” Laura sighs. “Much as we begrudge it, all this paperwork and processing comes with protection. Especially if my Bite kills one of our choices. For humans, we’re looking for teens. The Bite takes better at that age, with fewer complications. Even the sick ones.”

Stiles finds Erica Reyes’ file. Her parents are making a plea to cure her epilepsy. Stiles remembers the day she withdrew from public school, her terrifying seizing. He traces her pale face in the picture, remembers holding her jerking hand and rolling her onto her side, like muscle memory. For a second, he’d seen his mom.

There’s a handwritten letter in the packet, from Erica herself, and Stiles quickly tucks it back into the file’s side pocket, unwilling to read it. It feels like a breach of her privacy.

He puts her file on the corner of Laura’s desk and tentatively declares it the start of a Maybe pile.

There are a lot of Stiles’ classmates appearing in Laura’s office. He finds Vernon Boyd and Jackson Whittemore.

“But he’s a kanima! And he hates authority. He’d be the worst Beta ever.”

“Werewolves aren’t the only Supernaturals that benefit from having a pack,” Laura notes. “But I’d be hard pressed to welcome a Whittemore into this one.”

Poor Jackson. It’s not a secret he’s got a family complex ever since he found out he was adopted. Stiles wonders if he’s trying for some measure of control by applying to the local pack. He’s starting to get a sense for how easy it was for him to join the pack as Emissary. No application necessary, since it didn’t involve the Bite.

How lucky.

Miss Blake is right after all.

He sifts through a few more papers, pictures.

“No way,” he breathes.

Matt Daehler’s sour grape face glares up at him. Stiles holds it up to Laura and Derek.

“We definitely can’t choose this guy. He’s a huge human supremacist. I can’t even believe he would apply!”

Derek shrugs.

“It’s the same as outspoken homophobes being closeted queer. He’s probably always wanted to be a werewolf.”

Wow.

Stiles puts the file in the trash.

“Or he’s trying to find a way to get close to the pack to mess with it. I’m not taking that chance. He’s out.”

Laura and Derek exchange a shrug and smile.

“What are all of these?” Stiles asks, dragging another pile into his lap.

Laura pauses, her face grim. “Oh...”

“Terminally ill,” Derek says.

Stiles stomach drops. He flips the first blue file open.

A five year old with cancer, four months to live.

He flips to the next. A man with a degenerative disease, two years to live. A brain dead woman, coming up on the limit of her life support. Pages and pages of people yearning for the chance to be saved.

“Some,” Stiles rasps, licking his lips. “Some of these people won’t even live long enough for the processing period, so why. Why would they...”

“Desperation.”

Stiles looks up and around at all the other applicant’s faces feeling weightless, numb. He looks at their small stack of Maybes.

How can they consider someone like Boyd, who has no pressing reason to join a Pack? How can they pick a case like Isaac, or anyone, over the five year old girl with only months left to live?

He asks Laura, and she puts all the papers aside and grasps both of his hands in her lap.

“The Bite... is a gift,” she starts haltingly. “It can reverse devastating disease even in a person’s final hour. It transforms a person to their cells. _But_.”

Stiles meets her strong gaze reluctantly when she squeezes on his fingers.

“ _But_ we can’t offer it to everyone. We can’t save everyone. There’s more to consider than whether or not the Bite _can_ save someone. You have to think about afterward. How they would fit into the Pack, what they bring to the family. What to do with _their_ family. It’s permanent.”

“So basically, personality is more important than stopping a kid from _dying.”_

“I’m not saying it’s perfect or that it doesn’t suck,” Laura placates. “Part of my job as Alpha is making that decision even when it’s hard. Your job is to help me make the right one.”

Stiles digests this with difficulty. He looks at the stack, and it’s a _big_ stack, and he imagines every single one of them getting a rejection letter, a death sentence.

“Is this what happened to my mom?” he asks. “Dad always told me it was too late for her, but that wasn’t true, was it? She applied for the Bite.”

Laura’s lips pinch together.

“I was never given the particulars. You’ll have to ask my mom for the whole truth of it. She and your father never divulged out of respect.”

“Ask the Argents,” Derek spits.

“ _Derek_ ,” Laura chides.

Stiles is pretty sure Laura knows more than she’s suggesting, but he’s too afraid to ask just now. His whole life, his mom’s death has been something inescapable. Unstoppable. Certain. It was terminal. It was too late. There was nothing they could do to fix it. They could only hold on to her until she was gone.

The cavern that opens under him as he teases at the revelation that it might not be true, that her cure may have been held just out of reach; it’s insurmountable. Instead, he’s frozen, staring at the sea of blue files, detached.

They work for hours, weeding out the obvious duds and composing an electronic index. Stiles sees Laura oscillate between her work and the door, but she never stops working. Stiles thinks she’s avoiding the rest of the house, hiding from her mother. Stiles has tried to ask about the consequences of Peter hurting Deaton, of Laura splitting from her mother. He hasn't seen Peter once since that day.

“It isn’t as severe as you’re thinking. Deaton will heal quickly. He’s fine,” Laura keeps telling him.

“I swear this would be so much easier if it were like a dating app. Swipe left for yes, swipe right for no. Why isn’t this an electronic process yet?”

They laugh, even though Stiles isn’t really kidding.

It’ll take days to work through all the papers.

No one touches the stack of the dying applicants that Stiles has set aside.

They take a snack break when the fever of the day breaks, sitting on Talia’s back porch with sherbet push pops. The rest of the pack finds them laying out like that, eyeing Derek’s crop top and Laura’s John Lennon sunglasses. Stiles grows nervous. He expects to be ostracized, but the rest of the pack doesn’t even seem aware of yesterday’s events.

“Very Nineties,” Roman laughs. It turns into the whole pack clustered on the deck with varying sweet treats, like it always does. It’s nice, even if the Alpha pack lingers. They’re buffered by the sheer number of Hales, and Stiles can mostly ignore Kali and Deucalion leering at him every time he slurps at his popsicle.

When they get back to Laura’s office, Stiles notices bright yellow sticky notes dotting a few of the files and pictures.

He thumbs a yellow sticky note, thoughtfully, reading the short, messy scrawl.

_Psota_.

Only his mother had been fluent in Polish. He and his dad spoke only the basics, but there were a few words, just a few words that were special.

_Psota_. Mischief.  

“Did you write these?” he asks shakily, waving the note on his finger.

“Hmm?” Laura glances up absently. “I thought you did.”

Stiles swallows nervously. There’s an ink stain on his writing hand, but he doesn’t—

He doesn’t—

“Oh...yeah, duh.”

He peels one up to reveal the picture underneath. Matt Daehler of course. He peels off the other one.

It’s a young girl, maybe fourteen or so, and Stiles can tell the photo is kind of old. Her face is oddly familiar. He flips the small picture over and reveals a date and name.

“Who is Julia Baccari?”

Laura snatches the photo from him so fast, he can’t track her movements.

“She’s not an applicant. Must have gotten mixed up by mistake.”

Stiles watches her shove the photo in one of her filing cabinets, shocked.

“Okay...” he says, and they don’t say anything else on the matter.

“Hey, Laura?” Stiles asks, peeling off a fourth sticky note. It’s his handwriting.

“Hmm?”

“Would that spell still be active? Since it was interrupted?”

“It dissolved the moment Peter broke the spell circle.”

It should be reassuring.

Stiles traces the letters with his finger.

_Psota._

—

Scott’s got a stomach virus, so Stiles does the natural thing and skips school to lay in bed with him. Most people avoid one another when one’s got a gross and contagious illness, but Scott and Stiles are loyal. If one suffers diarrhea, so does the other.

Currently, Scott is sitting in the bathroom with a sippy cup of ginger ale, trying to take in as much fluid as he’s losing. Stiles sits on the other side of the door and attacks the jam with lysol every time an offensive smell tries to escape.

“I think I lost my virginity,” Stiles tells Scott through the door.

“You think?” Scott calls. “Like, you aren’t sure?”

All of Stiles’ bravery evaporates.

“I mean,” he wheezes between a cough and a gulp, voice breaking an octave, “virginity is a social construct determined by arbitrary and often inconstant factors. What is virginity? What is sex? Who knows? By some measures, I’ve already missed the virginity-losing moment; been there, done that. Right?”

“Right,” Scott says slowly, sounding very unsure. “Um—”

“So, it doesn’t even matter,” Stiles rushes to say. “I knew you’d get it; you’re the best, Scotty.”

“Okay. So… you wanna see the new Spiderman movie when you’re feeling better?” Scott asks.

He says _when you’re feeling better_ , because Stiles will inevitably catch whatever plague he’s carrying, and they’ll be out of commission for another week at least. It’s just how things work for them.

“Get some food after? But not that barbecue place, I still swear it’s what got me sick.”

There’s a moment of silence before Scott shouts.

“Not! To celebrate or anything. Because the virginity thing doesn’t matter. Whether or not you’ve lost it, because you aren’t sure.”

“You can’t even lose your virginity,” Stiles snaps. “Like, oh, I misplaced my virginity over the weekend. It’ll turn up eventually.”

“Hey, could you help me find my virginity?” Scott adds. “I dropped it somewhere at school.”

“Help! My virginity is lost. Ten thousand dollar reward if you find it.”

They laugh until Scott pukes.

“Do you think you could get Talia to give me the Bite?” he jokes. “I’m dying.”

Stiles imagines it. Scott would make a good wolf, he thinks, not that he has any idea of how to measure it. But he thinks of Scott’s qualities, how he’s just good, kind. He forgets where his homework almost every day, he tries out for a sport without a single athletic bone in his body, and he’s always failing. But Scott is the kind of person who thanks the world for every failure, and lives without reserve. He’s kind of shy, and unexpectedly cunning.

“I’ve got her on speed dial for when you make a turn for the worse.”

Scott hobbles out of the bathroom a few minutes later, rubbing his stomach pitifully. Stiles sprays him with lavender scented lysol.

“Hey!”

Melissa checks on them around lunch, unsurprised to find Stiles curled up on the couch. She gives them both broth and crackers, and presses a small wooden charm in Scott’s palm.

“From Deaton. For health.”

Scott and Stiles share an unimpressed look.

“You boys stay out of trouble. See you tonight!”

They play Halo for the rest of the day, and they don’t talk about virginity again.

—

There’s something wrong with him, Stiles thinks. Since he stepped into the ice bath.

Miss Blake’s classroom is cool and filled with the smoky scent of incense. It makes Stiles drowsy, in a good way. He’s languid, sagging into his rigid desk, assuming its shape with flexible bones.  

He feels off. Like something’s stepped into his skin and is festering inside, something that isn’t supposed to be there.

“Don’t tell anyone I was burning this,” Miss Blake says, fanning the smoldering end of a joss stick. “It counts as an open flame. But it’s relaxing. About the only thing that postpones the headache I get between fourth and fifth period.”

Stiles concentrates on the orange tip, smoke rising from it in a seamless stream, a winding river that drifts upwards and pools on the stained tiles of the ceiling. He strains, can feel its heat, a squirming current. He could squash it, he thinks, if he tries really hard. Or encourage it to burn faster.  

He feels agape suddenly, as though he were standing right over the incense with his mouth suspended and open.

“Maybe I should get some. There a werewolf friendly kind?”

There’s a distinct lack of scented candles, oils or perfumes on the Hale property. It isn’t that there aren’t store-bought fragrances for werewolves. They all just seem to prefer natural smells of life. Laura explains wolves are less sensitive to what smells bad and good, as opposed to what is irritating to smell and what isn’t.

“There’s a werewolf friendly kind of everything,” Miss Blake says, not as pleasant as Stiles expects.

He’s been getting lost lately. He’ll sit at his desk and find himself drifting at the tips of tree branches, brushing clouds with his leaves. He’ll feel his shoulders flex with the beat of his wings as his flock lifts off, the magnetism of the earth pulling at his hollow bones. He’ll roll over in the cool soil of a grave, feel arms around him, feel breath whisper in his ear—

The bell rings, and he’s in his seat again, the whole lesson gone. Stiles looks down at his notebook paper and finds a drawing of a tree.

“I did my first real spell,” he tells Miss Blake.

“You don’t seem happy about it.”

“I think it did something to me.”

“First spells are important. They often take something from the caster, something… unexpected. You’ll be fine.”

“It’s like an extra sense. Or maybe like losing a sense.”

Miss Blake smiles.

“You’ll get used to it in time. Be proud you’ve moved to the next step.”

Has he?

Stiles closes his eyes. He sees his father’s body lying in the center of rippling lake—no, a bathtub, or, or.

He sees his father standing in the Preserve, naked and covering himself in mistletoe leaves.

“Do you really think everything’s connected?” he asks, looking down at his drawing.

Miss Blake looks out the windows at the school parking lot, in thought,

“Have you ever heard of Pando?” she asks, and continues when Stiles shakes his head. “It’s about a hundred acres of somewhere around 40,000 trees in the Fishlake National Forest. It’s special. You know why?”

“No?”

“Because each of those trees is actually one tree. One root system. What look like individuals in a lush forest are actually branches. We’re branches, Stiles. All of us and everything. We share one root system.”

Stiles thinks he’s understands.

“I’ve been thinking on your little problem,” Miss Blake says.

“Which one?”

Miss Blake smiles.

“Your magical blockage. When is a door not a door?”

Stiles picks at his thumb nail.

“Is this supposed to make sense?”

“When it’s ajar,” Miss Blake tells him. “Casting your first spell might have garnered attention; opened you up.”

His heart beats fast for some reason.

“To what?”

“It’s what Beacon Hills is named for. The Beacon.”

“The what?” Stiles, asks.

Miss Blake’s smile grows wider.

“The Nemeton.”


End file.
